WeeklyUpdates/EmergingTechnology

July 24th, 2017

• AV1 codec now enabled in Firefox Nightly. Check it out by watching a bit of the short film ‘Tears of Steel’ http://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/. Keep in mind when you do that the whole idea here is to provide (and improve!) high quality audio and video on the web and make it all completely open and royalty free.
• Stylo has landed in Firefox Nightly on all platforms, so there’s more of Servo (and Project Quantum) for you to explore. It’s off by default but you can turn it on via a pref. Details on how to do that and general Stylo status info is available in a public Etherpad here.
• Keep an eye on Test Pilot this week for news as we’re launching an experiment called “Voice Fill” which will let you interact with the Web by talking to Firefox. Up first will be voice input to search engines so you can initiate web searches through speech.
• We’ve unveiled “Project Things” our Web of Things initiative, and our first project, an open WoT gateway, is available on github for download and use on a Raspberry Pi. Give it a try! Turn your lights on and off at home with it. (We do.)
• We trust you’re keeping an eye on what we’re up to with Developers by following our Hacks blog, but in case you aren’t Lin Clark published another great “Code Cartoon”, this time explaining how you can add WebAssembly to JavaScript on your web page and what’s going on under the covers when you do that. And we have posts from Andre Vrignaud and Jukka Jylänki about the latest and greatest for gaming on the Web.