the and tags along with native support for Theora video and Vorbis audio are currently enabled in the Firefox nightly builds. This will ship in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 coming later this year. This is not new news but I did want to provide my perspective on why this is important[...] Download a Firefox nightly build here and test it out here or on Wikimedia Commons.

"Big boost to the PlayOGG campaign coming from Firefox:

«This is the first beta from Mozilla to include support for the and elements. This beta includes support for the OGG Theora and OGG Vorbis formats on all platforms» ..."

"...'Ogg' is a wrapper that ties together 'Theora' encoded video and 'Vorbis' encoded sound. Together, Ogg Theora+Vorbis give users a way to see movies on your computer. Ogg Vorbis+Theora are not known to be encumbered by any patents (the only applicable patent on Theora’s predecessor, called 'VP3', was licensed for everyone to use in any way they want).

Video and audio support will soon be built directly into Firefox, by way of the free Vorbis and Theora codecs, and Mozilla is using the opportunity to advance multimedia accessibility for hearing-impaired and seeing-impaired users.

"The WHATWG HTML 5 working draft has a specification for a 'video' element.I briefly mentioned in a previous post that I was working on implementing this tag natively in Firefox. The intent is to display Ogg Theora encoded video without needing any plugins...

With much faster rendering, HTML 5 support, native video handling improved standards support and more, Firefox is back

"...Firefox and Opera will support a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in Web pages. [...] If video encoded in Ogg Theora plays directly in the browser..."

"While you might have heard of Flash, SilverLight etc which are proprietary application frameworks to create RIA(Rich Internet Application) and have been developed by Adobe and Microsoft respectively. But did you know that Firefox has inbuilt support for various frameworks such as SVG, Theora and OGG, which can be used to create and build RIAs..."

HTML 5's support of using the Ogg Theora video format in the upcoming tag looked really promising for innovation in the web video area, but not everyone agrees on the new spec.