Microsoft has released a Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox. The plugin obviously only works on Windows. "We couldn't respond as quickly as we would have liked to (we had to get Windows Vista out the door!), but now that it's shipped, the team has moved its attention to getting Firefox users up and running. This week we are happy to say that we have a new plug-in for Firefox that makes WMP work once again."
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Member since:2006-01-19
It is simply a change of focus by Microsoft.
As MS clearly cannot dictate the basic XHTML format anymore to remain on a IE-only policy is no longer advantagous.
Further, MS sees the multimedia format for the internet become Flash. This distresses them much much more than loosing another 5% Market share to Firefox. They want to be able to dictate the internet multimedia formats, they want to lock in as many people as possible. Locking them into IE clearly did not work, so now they try to tie people to the Windows platform. IE always has been a vehicle to tie people to the Windows platform, because ONLY there they can keep selling people the Office suite which is THE main reason why businesses don't switch over to Apple or Linux in droves.
IE never was the cash cow, that always has been Windows and Office. MS is simply using differently coloured shackles to tie people to the Microsoft ecosystem.
Website creators no longer can ignore Firefox on Windows, but for sure they can ignore $AnyBrowser on Linux and Apple.
As I see it, Firefox has forced MS to better adhere to agreed-on standards of the W3C, but for Multimedia there is no standard yet, so MS can play their same old dirty game in that area again.
For getting a warm "thank you" and "welcome" from the open source and open standards communities, MS would have had to call for a standardisation effort which is based on existing open video and audio formats. To get their own WMF formats into that standard they would have to completely open it.
By the way, NO programmer in the community would ask Microsoft to open source their implementation of that standard!
Member since:2007-03-26
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If webdevelopers coded their sites correctly to start with, then the sites should be platform independant by default (asuming the webbrowsers adhear to the w3c standards)
Member since:
2005-10-04
This can only be a good thing in terms of helping to spread Firefox even further and, for once I believe Microsoft have acted sensibly. It does make a refreshing change!