The Beauty of the Community
2009 July 12
It was only about 12 days ago that we released Firefox 3.5 and unveiled one of the new core features; support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. Less than 12 days later, community members have created basic full screen support for the video element; an enhancement feature in design phase on Bugzilla!
That’s incredible!
Full Screen Video, is the name of the add-on, and it adds a Full Screen option to the context menu for HTML5 videos.
Cheers, ‘design-noir’
Aaron
5 Responses
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If by “community members,” you mean “Mozilla Corporation employees,” then yes, “community members” have created basic full-screen support. To most people, though, “community” usually means “people who aren’t paid to work on this project” or “people who are not main developers of this project” (for projects which don’t have paid developers).
That’s not to disparage the work that Dão and dolske have done, of course; it’s just that working on features for Firefox is their job. ;)
Hello,
Thanks for the response. I acknowledge and appreciate your comment. I am not sure of the original author of this addon, as I could only name the author by the title of the website it was found. If this addon is the equivalent to the current patch of the enhancement in the Bugzilla then apologies, I thought it was non-employee :)
Cheers,
Aaron
To be exact, I’m a contractor, not an employee. But in any case, I do consider myself a community member. I wasn’t asked to develop the extension, I did it out of interest and in my spare time. In fact, I didn’t know about bug 453063 at that time.
Yes, design-noir.de is Dão’s website. ;)
It’s not uncommon for Mozilla developers to create extensions for early versions of features they’re working on, in order to make it easier for a wider segment of users to test and give feedback. When developers do that, they’ll host the extensions on their own websites, and I guess over time it does become difficult to keep track of what developer belongs to what website–especially if developers use a work email in Bugzilla rather than an email associated with their domain!
And to be clear Dao was a Mozilla community member developing extensions long before he became a contractor.
Phil