MS Releases New Media Player Firefox Plugin

SilentChris writes "Microsoft today released a new Media Player plugin for Firefox that resolves the problems users of the older version were experiencing. According to the company's Port 25 blog, it's backwards compatible with Windows Media Player 6.4. The plugin is for Windows XP and Vista only, but if you have to watch WMV video at least it's less likely to crash your browser."

Comments

Unlike the state of Florida or parts of it

[zappepcs]

I simply say NO to .wmv files... meh, no big loss so far as I can tell.

Re:Unlike the state of Florida or parts of it

[@madeus]

Know why proprietary stuff is better sometimes? It's called technical support. Good technical support doesn't make a worse product better.

It's only better if it is actually better at what it's supposed to do, otherwise it's still worse.

I already have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing, and it's pretty simple to determine the cause of any problem with software I mind find. I know how to debug third party software on Unix and Windows, identifying the fault usually isn't that hard. It's fair to say I'm probably better at diagnosing odd problems (the sort that actually prompt someone competent to contact the vendor) than some random joe technical support.

The technical support center will almost certainly make me want to jump through a large number of time wasting hoops to be sure I'm not a moron. Sometimes that process can take days, or even weeks - even when it's obviously their crummy software.

Past that, the problem is getting bugs fixed once you've found them and technical support can't help you with that (typically vendors don't really care about bugs unless they are easy to fix or effecting a large number of customers - otherwise it goes on to the bottom of the 'to do' list).

Re:Who cares?

[MankyD]

With most online videos using flash based video players, who really cares that they even released this plug-in?

I would bet this is partly in response to that shift. For a little while at least, WMP was doing quite well on the web - it certainly beat out Real Player. Now that Flash has mature video capabilities and works/worked better in Firefox (and will in other browsers), many people have moved away from WMP.

Re:And

[mandelbr0t]

No need to make anything up. The litany of Bill Gates' sins could take up an entire year if read out loud. Then we move on to Ballmer...

When you're on top of the world, people always try to pull you down. In most cases, the people are justified.

Re:Meh

[TheCRAIGGERS]

So.... you're expecting Microsoft to spend money to help out the competition?

Yes, usually format owners want their format to be usable on as many platforms as possible. However, in this case, they already have dominance. I don't see how supporting Linux is going to help them at all, and they probably see it the same way.

The flip side is there probably aren't too many Linux users out there that would use it anyway, especially when mplayer works just fine usually. I know I wouldn't use it.

Re:insightful??

[zappepcs]

I'll give it a go

1 - I didn't mod the comment up
2 - I'm not a tool
3 - I didn't bash MS, I simply said I don't roll that way. I figure if someone can't put their content out in at least two formats they didn't really want anyone to see it anyway. You see, HTML and your web browsing experience is protected by a general compliance with standards. With video content there are too many standards. I think that MPEG is a good standard, consequently I ignore those pesky .wmv and most of the .mov files too. Its nice that people can make up their own formats for stuff, but I'm also happy to not view it if I have to load their special player... oh well.

There! Feel better? I didn't even mention Mi^H^H those people from Redmond.

Now, if you want a bit more thought, do you get this angry when someone says they don't like Bridgestone tires?

Re:Zwha?

[NDPTAL85]

Thats a bit paranoid don't you think?

Re:Wow.

[TopSpin]

Did anyone see this coming? Yes. Two reasons: a.) flash is dominating online video because it's lightweight and cross platform and b.) Firefox can no longer be ignored.

I know a is true because (probably) like you, I'm watching a lot of online video, and I'm much more likely to do so if it's flash. I know b is true because clients of the company I'm contracting for have just (yesterday) decided to shift priorities and get a port of an existing ActiveX control running in Firefox, rather than develop the next release of the IE software.

Microsoft doesn't want WMV to become irrelevant simply because it doesn't work without IE. It doesn't address the cross platform issue but at least Firefox+Windows users won't be hindered.

We just saw a story here about Firefox holding 25% of the European market. You can't walk away from that when Adobe is lunching on your market share. No way.