This article was published on March 18, 2014

Firefox 28 arrives with VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, HTML5 video and audio volume controls


Firefox 28 arrives with VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, HTML5 video and audio volume controls

Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 28 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, and volume controls for HTML5 video and audio.

Firefox 28 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.

On all platforms, Firefox has gained VP9 video decoding. For those who don’t know, VP9 is the successor to VP8, both of which fall under Google’s WebM project of freeing Web codecs from royalty constraints.

Desktop

While this isn’t a major release, Firefox 28 does have specific changes worth noting for both Windows and OS X. The former has lost support for Metro while the latter has gained Notification Center support for Web notifications.

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Here’s the full changelog for Firefox 28:

  • NEW: VP9 video decoding implemented.
  • NEW: Mac OS X: Notification Center support for web notifications.
  • NEW: Volume control for HTML5 audio/video.
  • NEW: Support for Opus in WebM.
  • CHANGED: Now that spdy/3 is implemented support for spdy/2 has been removed and servers without spdy/3 will negotiate to http/1 without any penalty.
  • DEVELOPER: Support for MathML 2.0 ‘mathvariant’ attribute.
  • DEVELOPER: Background thread hang reporting.
  • DEVELOPER: Support for multi-line flexbox in layout.
  • FIXED: Various security fixes.

If you’re a Web developer, you should probably check out Firefox 28 for developers.

Android

This release is a much bigger one than Firefox 28 for Android. Here’s the full Firefox 28 for Android changelog:

  • NEW: More native text selection, cut, and copy.
  • NEW: Awesomebar entries now trigger predictive lookup.
  • NEW: Added multiple quick share buttons.
  • NEW: Added support for OpenSearch.
  • NEW: Estonian [et] locale added.
  • NEW: VP9 video decoding implemented.
  • NEW: Volume control for HTML5 audio/video.
  • NEW: Support for Opus in WebM.
  • NEW: Added settings switch to toggle dynamic toolbar mode.
  • CHANGED: Now that spdy/3 is implemented support for spdy/2 has been removed and servers without spdy/3 will negotiate to http/1 without any penalty.
  • DEVELOPER: Support for MathML 2.0 ‘mathvariant’ attribute.
  • DEVELOPER: Support for multi-line flexbox in layout.
  • DEVELOPER: Background thread hang reporting.
  • FIXED: Explore By Touch automatically loading web pages (963000).
  • FIXED: Various security fixes.

If you’re having difficulty keeping track of all these updates, don’t worry. Firefox 29 will be out at the end of April.

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