If you're going by their track record, it's an easy answer: None.
Well even if it does, my first question would be: Which version?
Vista comes in a bewildering array of versions, with the fully uncrippled version (Ultimate) costing a truly eye-watering amount of money. Given that Windows 7 is meant to be "an improved version of Vista", I'd say the probability of it following the same pattern is high indeed. So how much will the 256-core version cost and how many will the other versions support?
I dislike reading PDFs in the browser anyway. My preference is to just download any PDFs I may want to read, and use KPDF to read them outside the browser. This neatly avoids the possibility of any such lockups. I also use Video DownloadHelper so I can watch YouTube videos with VLC media player rather than using my browser. I hate any site that tries to force me into viewing such media on-line. If I can't download and view such things off-line, then I'll do without them.
I'm a long term Mozilla fan (Mozilla Application Suite, Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, I've used the lot as my main browser), but Firefox 3.1 is actually managing to exceed my expectations. It's being developed on time (I thought it would be delayed), it's even faster than Firefox 3.0 (I didn't really think it to be possible they could make it that much faster), they've found a good compromise with the awesomebar (which I actually like already), and they've just managed to hit 93/100 on Acid3 on Firefox 3.1b2pre (which is already past my previous prediction for "80-90/100" for Firefox 3.1 final).
I used to say that Mozilla would have to speed up development to stay ahead of the competition and keep Firefox around as my browser of choice. Firefox 3.0 certainly helped with this, and I see no indications that Firefox 3.1 will disappoint.
Also, note to whoever made this news post. It's "Firefox", not "FireFox". Your nerd credentials are officially revoked, please leave Slashdot immediately.
No, I don't remember performance being mentioned in the anti-trust cases. And why would they? It would highlight an uncompetitive advantage and weaken their position.
Citation needed.
Well if you're willing to take Wikipedia as a citation, then:
"A number of videotapes were submitted as evidence by Microsoft during the trial, including one that demonstrated that removing Internet Explorer from Microsoft Windows caused slowdowns and malfunctions in Windows." (Emphasis added)
Microsoft later withdrew the claim, but only because the plaintiffs spotted that Microsoft attempted to mislead the court with their initial video demonstration. I'm still disgusted that no one from Microsoft was directly prosecuted for any of that.
If you're not sober enough to do the math, perhaps you're sober enough to copy/paste them into google so it can give you the answers;)
I'd be more inclined to use the operating system's own calculator (SpeedCrunch in my case) rather than asking some other computer hundreds or even thousands of miles away to do it and send the results when it's done. Aside from the inherent unreliability with internet connections, why the fuck would I delegate simple math questions to an external source when I've got a Core 2 Duo idling right here? Even my 486DX2/66 from twelve years ago wouldn't be taxed by questions these simple.
Well who can blame them? I'd detail my experiences with the GameCube, but I might as well just write a review of Super Smash Bros. Melee instead, that was the only truly remarkable game I played on it. Super Mario Sunshine? Patently inferior to Super Mario 64. Soul Calibur II? Can't match the original. Mario Kart: Double Dash? Simply couldn't hold my interest.
I know I'm missing some good stuff (Metroid Prime, why did I never play that?), but my experiences were poor. SSBM is the only game to not be surpassed before or (maybe) since. I'm still forming my final opinion on SSBB...
Anyone who thinks IE standards support has improved from IE7 to IE8 is sadly mistaken
Well it passes Acid2 now (as long as it's hosted at webstandards.org) and currently gets 21/100 on Acid3 (compared to 14/100 for IE7) so there must be some improvement in IE8.
Re:this is getting interesting
on
China Blocks iTunes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They'd pull the internet connection; don't kid yourself.
So they either give up the firewall and open up, or kill the internet access entirely and cut themselves off from what has proven to be the single most important invention of recent years. It's lose-lose for them, and win-win for us. What have we got to lose?
Of course I use Firefox 3, but ENOUGH with software pushing "upgrades". Seems like every other day some program or another is nagging me to upgrade or check for updates. Java, Quicktime, Acrobat, whatever.
Funny, I don't get any of that. Every few days or so, Adept tells me there are updates available, I type in my password, download the updates, and we're done. I can't for the life of me figure out... oh, wait, you're using Windows aren't you? Really, after experiencing the convenience of having a single package manager for all of my applications, I really wonder how having every application take care of its own updates ever worked.
Version 3 breaks UnPlug and FireWhat, among others, I can see lots of people not wanting to give up their favorite addons to upgrade. I for one upgraded but miss Unplug, its annoying to have to reload video on a slow connection when I want to show something funny to the kids that I found while they were napping.
A five minute search on Mozilla Add-ons led to me this, a version of UnPlug that supposedly works with Firefox 3. Not tested it myself, but maybe it's just what you're looking for.
Yay ! Wonderful low-bandwidth youtube streaming video in all its glorious crap-quality !
The best way to show technical demos about photo-realism !
Can't really help much with the quality (adding '&fmt=18' makes it about the best it can be) but using the Video DownloadHelper extension for Firefox allows you to download YouTube videos rather than just streaming them.
Additional tip: When using Video DownloadHelper on YouTube, several download options will be presented to you. You want the one labelled 'video.mp4' (just rename it to whatever you want when downloading it), that's the high quality video. The FLVs are all standard quality for some reason.
Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk was ejected from a San Francisco art museum because the security guard apparently thought his expensive camera could be used to spy on female employees. Another photographer notes that 'many people consider a professional-looking camera a threat,'
I've been taking some pictures out of our bathroom window here using a Kodak EasyShare P850. It's not the greatest camera ever (5 megapixels, rather noisy sensor, bad in low light conditions) but it does look sort of like an SLR camera (I've had people mistake me for a professional photographer on at least two occasions), and it has a 12x zoom lens. So after a while of this, I heard something along the lines of "It's the pervert again" and later that night, the fucking police arrive! They seemed to be rather unconcerned about the whole thing, but I was shocked and a bit angry. Why didn't the person just come and ask me to stop taking pictures if they were so bothered about it? It would probably give their call to the police a little more legitimacy if they at least uttered the words "Could you stop taking pictures please?" at some point during the proceedings.
I later went around to where I suspect the phone call was made, and found a rather mouthy woman who talked about being worried about a pervert taking pictures of them getting changed. With my experience with this camera, that's ridiculous. With a high-quality tripod, massive zoom lens, and 20 megapixel digital SLR (at least £2500 worth of kit by my reckoning, a far cry from the £100 my camera cost) then maybe I could get something. But an obstruction as flimsy as net curtains would render even that setup meaningless, and taking a picture of someone on the other side of the street through their window while never leaving your own window is a bit like trying to watch a striptease through two keyholes that are a whole room apart.
Really, this paranoia about picture taking is getting to be more than a joke. I had a bit of a laugh at the ridiculous stories around photo paranoia, but it really takes the fun out of things when you end up talking to police about it. Being that I live in Britain, it find it somewhat ironic that people will complain about me taking pictures of them with my camera while we're both being filmed at all times by various CCTV cameras. At least they can ask me to stop, and I will. Try asking the same of the operators of those damn things.
Everytime I see this company mentioned on Slashdot, they're still referred to as 'MediaSentry (now SafeNet)'. Why? Is it because the MediaSentry name is still so evocative?
It's because the name change is just a cynical attempt to try and get rid of a name that has 'negative connotations' attached to it, like Palladium becoming the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or the Security Systems and Standards Certification Act becoming the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. The new name is just designed to confuse people, so we list it alongside the old name to emphasize to everyone that nothing has changed, SafeNet is MediaSentry.
Ogg did not originate from Discworld, according to Wikipedia:
"It is sometimes assumed that the name Ogg comes from the character of Nanny Ogg in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. However, it derives from ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek which came to mean doing something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. At its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time."
What the hell is Obama thinking? His adversaries will be all over him about this (it hardly resonates with "Change we can believe in") and his traditional allies aren't going to be doing much to defend him. I still want Obama to beat McCain, but I can't bring myself to defend him over this. He could've abstained like McCain (who was clearly thinking about the implications of his vote on this), but he had to vote in favour for some reason. I really do hope this impacts on his approval ratings, so he hopefully gets the message that his supporters really don't like this bill and he has to stop pulling this shit to keep their support.
I run Ubuntu 8.04 and found ff3.0 to be a bit buggy esp when opening multiple tabs
I actually had a much worse experience. I opened up Firefox 3, it seemed OK. I closed it and opened Firefox 2 again, only to find it completely fucked. All of the extensions that had been disabled for Firefox 3 wouldn't reactivate, some extensions that hadn't been disabled were dead for some reason, I couldn't configure any extensions, and couldn't even uninstall any of them. Firefox 3 seemed to have pretty solidly FUBARed something. Not being able to figure what the hell had happened, I backed everything up and just killed my entire profile before reinstalling both.
No idea why it happened. I tried running alphas, betas, and even nightlies alongside Firefox 2 with no problems, but then a release candidate did that! I'm currently keeping away from Firefox 3 until I'm sure I'm ready to use it for good. It seems like a good browser, but I don't want to go through that again.
If 83.3% of Firefox users are deemed to be using the 'most secure' version, then that definition probably means they're using either Firefox 2.0.0.15 or Firefox 3.0.0 as opposed to any earlier version. So you'd be fine with Firefox 2.0.0.15, which is exactly what I'm using right now.
How about make OpenOffice or Koffice not "good enough for most users" to be so awesome that it surpasses MS Office? That's why Firefox caught on, it was significantly better than IE 6 in terms of functionality and SECURITY that it was able to become a contender.
But Firefox was only significantly better than IE 6 because Microsoft completely stopped releasing new versions of Internet Explorer for five years. Considering how quickly software moves, it wasn't exactly hard for Mozilla to create a better browser. Microsoft's now paying the price for insisting that Internet Explorer releases be tied to Windows releases. If a version of Windows gets delayed, so does the corresponding version of IE, and the browser market is considerably more competitive than the operating system market as things stand.
Microsoft Office is different. Since Microsoft saw fit to release a new version alongside Windows Server 2003 for some reason (a new version of MS Office but no new version of IE for Windows Server 2003? WTF?), MS Office didn't get so hilariously outdated. The reason for this all is simple enough, Microsoft charge for MS Office but don't for IE. So they keep MS Office up to scratch with new features, but only keep adding new features to IE if someone starts seriously challenging them. Otherwise it's security updates on Patch Tuesday and maybe a token feature update every now and then.
I'll probably enjoy the user interface changes myself (I haven't go acquainted much with the 'awesomebar', I'm waiting on my extensions), but I'm really more excited about some backend changes. @font-face is my 'pet bug' of the moment, I'd like to see that in Firefox 3.1. I'm also watching progress on SVG animation and SVG in img tag. I'm reasonably hopeful for seeing better and more flexible SVG support in Firefox 3.1, and it's about time.
I hope to see the html 5 video support added for Fx3.1
You're almost certainly going to get it, with Ogg Theora support at the very least (a DirectShow backend for Windows, QuickTime backend for Mac OS X, and GStreamer backend for Linux are also in the works). But the real question that no one seems to be asking is, where is HTML 5 audio support? It's just as much a part of the specification, and Ogg Vorbis is well-known enough that corporate entities aren't so worried about patents. I've seen some work on it recently, but I'm not sure it's mature enough to make the deadline. HTML 5 audio and video support in Firefox 3.1 would be a dream though. Safari already has at least some support for both, and Opera has partial support for audio with video surely not far off. Internet Explorer is obviously going to take a long time to catch up, but I guess we can't have everything...
You can keep dreaming. While Firefox 3.1 is certainly going to improve on Firefox 3.0 (Firefox 3.0 gets 71/100, Firefox 3.1 pre-alpha 1 gets 80/100, I predict Firefox 3.1 final to get 80-90/100), the aim to make changes drastic enough to make Firefox 3.1 pass Acid3 and the aim to get Firefox 3.1 released in a Q4 2008/Q1 2009 timeframe are plainly incompatible. I'd expect Acid3 to pass in Firefox 4.0 myself. Shouldn't be much of a surprise given how long it took Firefox to pass the Acid2 test, but then that never stopped us from using it.;-)
You're probably thinking of XHTML 2.0, though img is still present there. HTML 5 came about when Apple, Mozilla, and Opera decided they didn't like where XHTML was going. They started the WHATWG, and made a draft of HTML 5. The W3C has since restarted development on HTML, and it looks like XHTML 2.0 may be dead before it's even started. HTML 5 can be formulated as XHTML anyway (XHTML 5), where we will finally dump the whole DOCTYPE pointlessness and make it clear that it's the internet media type and not the DOCTYPE that makes an XHTML document.
native support for video (in the form of the tag and a Free codec such as Ogg Theora). The latter is actually already written, but Mozilla isn't going live with it yet because of patent fears from certain large companies.
I thought that was because it just wasn't finished in time for Firefox 3.0, hence why they're implementing it in Firefox 3.1 instead. If Mozilla are worried about submarine patents, they've kept that very quiet. Apple have been quite vocal of their worries about submarine patents in Theora, while Nokia seem to have objected without knowing quite what it is they're objecting to, but Mozilla supported making it a part of the HTML 5 spec.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going by their track record, it's an easy answer: None.
Well even if it does, my first question would be: Which version?
Vista comes in a bewildering array of versions, with the fully uncrippled version (Ultimate) costing a truly eye-watering amount of money. Given that Windows 7 is meant to be "an improved version of Vista", I'd say the probability of it following the same pattern is high indeed. So how much will the 256-core version cost and how many will the other versions support?
I dislike reading PDFs in the browser anyway. My preference is to just download any PDFs I may want to read, and use KPDF to read them outside the browser. This neatly avoids the possibility of any such lockups. I also use Video DownloadHelper so I can watch YouTube videos with VLC media player rather than using my browser. I hate any site that tries to force me into viewing such media on-line. If I can't download and view such things off-line, then I'll do without them.
I'm a long term Mozilla fan (Mozilla Application Suite, Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, I've used the lot as my main browser), but Firefox 3.1 is actually managing to exceed my expectations. It's being developed on time (I thought it would be delayed), it's even faster than Firefox 3.0 (I didn't really think it to be possible they could make it that much faster), they've found a good compromise with the awesomebar (which I actually like already), and they've just managed to hit 93/100 on Acid3 on Firefox 3.1b2pre (which is already past my previous prediction for "80-90/100" for Firefox 3.1 final).
I used to say that Mozilla would have to speed up development to stay ahead of the competition and keep Firefox around as my browser of choice. Firefox 3.0 certainly helped with this, and I see no indications that Firefox 3.1 will disappoint.
Also, note to whoever made this news post. It's "Firefox", not "FireFox". Your nerd credentials are officially revoked, please leave Slashdot immediately.
No, I don't remember performance being mentioned in the anti-trust cases. And why would they? It would highlight an uncompetitive advantage and weaken their position.
Citation needed.
Well if you're willing to take Wikipedia as a citation, then:
"A number of videotapes were submitted as evidence by Microsoft during the trial, including one that demonstrated that removing Internet Explorer from Microsoft Windows caused slowdowns and malfunctions in Windows." (Emphasis added)
Microsoft later withdrew the claim, but only because the plaintiffs spotted that Microsoft attempted to mislead the court with their initial video demonstration. I'm still disgusted that no one from Microsoft was directly prosecuted for any of that.
If you're not sober enough to do the math, perhaps you're sober enough to copy/paste them into google so it can give you the answers ;)
I'd be more inclined to use the operating system's own calculator (SpeedCrunch in my case) rather than asking some other computer hundreds or even thousands of miles away to do it and send the results when it's done. Aside from the inherent unreliability with internet connections, why the fuck would I delegate simple math questions to an external source when I've got a Core 2 Duo idling right here? Even my 486DX2/66 from twelve years ago wouldn't be taxed by questions these simple.
Well who can blame them? I'd detail my experiences with the GameCube, but I might as well just write a review of Super Smash Bros. Melee instead, that was the only truly remarkable game I played on it. Super Mario Sunshine? Patently inferior to Super Mario 64. Soul Calibur II? Can't match the original. Mario Kart: Double Dash? Simply couldn't hold my interest.
I know I'm missing some good stuff (Metroid Prime, why did I never play that?), but my experiences were poor. SSBM is the only game to not be surpassed before or (maybe) since. I'm still forming my final opinion on SSBB...
Less surprising perhaps, I keep getting the status code 301 for www.microsoft.com/steve-ballmers-chair
"ERROR 404: Page not available."
There is no chair.
Anyone who thinks IE standards support has improved from IE7 to IE8 is sadly mistaken
Well it passes Acid2 now (as long as it's hosted at webstandards.org) and currently gets 21/100 on Acid3 (compared to 14/100 for IE7) so there must be some improvement in IE8.
They'd pull the internet connection; don't kid yourself.
So they either give up the firewall and open up, or kill the internet access entirely and cut themselves off from what has proven to be the single most important invention of recent years. It's lose-lose for them, and win-win for us. What have we got to lose?
Of course I use Firefox 3, but ENOUGH with software pushing "upgrades". Seems like every other day some program or another is nagging me to upgrade or check for updates. Java, Quicktime, Acrobat, whatever.
Funny, I don't get any of that. Every few days or so, Adept tells me there are updates available, I type in my password, download the updates, and we're done. I can't for the life of me figure out... oh, wait, you're using Windows aren't you? Really, after experiencing the convenience of having a single package manager for all of my applications, I really wonder how having every application take care of its own updates ever worked.
Version 3 breaks UnPlug and FireWhat, among others, I can see lots of people not wanting to give up their favorite addons to upgrade. I for one upgraded but miss Unplug, its annoying to have to reload video on a slow connection when I want to show something funny to the kids that I found while they were napping.
A five minute search on Mozilla Add-ons led to me this, a version of UnPlug that supposedly works with Firefox 3. Not tested it myself, but maybe it's just what you're looking for.
Yay ! Wonderful low-bandwidth youtube streaming video in all its glorious crap-quality !
The best way to show technical demos about photo-realism !
Can't really help much with the quality (adding '&fmt=18' makes it about the best it can be) but using the Video DownloadHelper extension for Firefox allows you to download YouTube videos rather than just streaming them.
Additional tip: When using Video DownloadHelper on YouTube, several download options will be presented to you. You want the one labelled 'video.mp4' (just rename it to whatever you want when downloading it), that's the high quality video. The FLVs are all standard quality for some reason.
Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk was ejected from a San Francisco art museum because the security guard apparently thought his expensive camera could be used to spy on female employees. Another photographer notes that 'many people consider a professional-looking camera a threat,'
I've been taking some pictures out of our bathroom window here using a Kodak EasyShare P850. It's not the greatest camera ever (5 megapixels, rather noisy sensor, bad in low light conditions) but it does look sort of like an SLR camera (I've had people mistake me for a professional photographer on at least two occasions), and it has a 12x zoom lens. So after a while of this, I heard something along the lines of "It's the pervert again" and later that night, the fucking police arrive! They seemed to be rather unconcerned about the whole thing, but I was shocked and a bit angry. Why didn't the person just come and ask me to stop taking pictures if they were so bothered about it? It would probably give their call to the police a little more legitimacy if they at least uttered the words "Could you stop taking pictures please?" at some point during the proceedings.
I later went around to where I suspect the phone call was made, and found a rather mouthy woman who talked about being worried about a pervert taking pictures of them getting changed. With my experience with this camera, that's ridiculous. With a high-quality tripod, massive zoom lens, and 20 megapixel digital SLR (at least £2500 worth of kit by my reckoning, a far cry from the £100 my camera cost) then maybe I could get something. But an obstruction as flimsy as net curtains would render even that setup meaningless, and taking a picture of someone on the other side of the street through their window while never leaving your own window is a bit like trying to watch a striptease through two keyholes that are a whole room apart.
Really, this paranoia about picture taking is getting to be more than a joke. I had a bit of a laugh at the ridiculous stories around photo paranoia, but it really takes the fun out of things when you end up talking to police about it. Being that I live in Britain, it find it somewhat ironic that people will complain about me taking pictures of them with my camera while we're both being filmed at all times by various CCTV cameras. At least they can ask me to stop, and I will. Try asking the same of the operators of those damn things.
Everytime I see this company mentioned on Slashdot, they're still referred to as 'MediaSentry (now SafeNet)'. Why? Is it because the MediaSentry name is still so evocative?
It's because the name change is just a cynical attempt to try and get rid of a name that has 'negative connotations' attached to it, like Palladium becoming the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, or the Security Systems and Standards Certification Act becoming the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. The new name is just designed to confuse people, so we list it alongside the old name to emphasize to everyone that nothing has changed, SafeNet is MediaSentry.
Ogg and Vorbis names of characters in Terry Pratchett novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld I'm not sure where Theora originated.
Ogg did not originate from Discworld, according to Wikipedia:
"It is sometimes assumed that the name Ogg comes from the character of Nanny Ogg in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. However, it derives from ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek which came to mean doing something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. At its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time."
Eh, regardless of his position or wealth do 84 year olds really go to pound-me-in-the-ass prison for white collar crimes?
Well he may not have ever got his hands dirty personally, but I sure as hell wouldn't think twice about sending Robert Mugabe to one.
What the hell is Obama thinking? His adversaries will be all over him about this (it hardly resonates with "Change we can believe in") and his traditional allies aren't going to be doing much to defend him. I still want Obama to beat McCain, but I can't bring myself to defend him over this. He could've abstained like McCain (who was clearly thinking about the implications of his vote on this), but he had to vote in favour for some reason. I really do hope this impacts on his approval ratings, so he hopefully gets the message that his supporters really don't like this bill and he has to stop pulling this shit to keep their support.
I run Ubuntu 8.04 and found ff3.0 to be a bit buggy esp when opening multiple tabs
I actually had a much worse experience. I opened up Firefox 3, it seemed OK. I closed it and opened Firefox 2 again, only to find it completely fucked. All of the extensions that had been disabled for Firefox 3 wouldn't reactivate, some extensions that hadn't been disabled were dead for some reason, I couldn't configure any extensions, and couldn't even uninstall any of them. Firefox 3 seemed to have pretty solidly FUBARed something. Not being able to figure what the hell had happened, I backed everything up and just killed my entire profile before reinstalling both.
No idea why it happened. I tried running alphas, betas, and even nightlies alongside Firefox 2 with no problems, but then a release candidate did that! I'm currently keeping away from Firefox 3 until I'm sure I'm ready to use it for good. It seems like a good browser, but I don't want to go through that again.
If 83.3% of Firefox users are deemed to be using the 'most secure' version, then that definition probably means they're using either Firefox 2.0.0.15 or Firefox 3.0.0 as opposed to any earlier version. So you'd be fine with Firefox 2.0.0.15, which is exactly what I'm using right now.
How about make OpenOffice or Koffice not "good enough for most users" to be so awesome that it surpasses MS Office? That's why Firefox caught on, it was significantly better than IE 6 in terms of functionality and SECURITY that it was able to become a contender.
But Firefox was only significantly better than IE 6 because Microsoft completely stopped releasing new versions of Internet Explorer for five years. Considering how quickly software moves, it wasn't exactly hard for Mozilla to create a better browser. Microsoft's now paying the price for insisting that Internet Explorer releases be tied to Windows releases. If a version of Windows gets delayed, so does the corresponding version of IE, and the browser market is considerably more competitive than the operating system market as things stand.
Microsoft Office is different. Since Microsoft saw fit to release a new version alongside Windows Server 2003 for some reason (a new version of MS Office but no new version of IE for Windows Server 2003? WTF?), MS Office didn't get so hilariously outdated. The reason for this all is simple enough, Microsoft charge for MS Office but don't for IE. So they keep MS Office up to scratch with new features, but only keep adding new features to IE if someone starts seriously challenging them. Otherwise it's security updates on Patch Tuesday and maybe a token feature update every now and then.
I'll probably enjoy the user interface changes myself (I haven't go acquainted much with the 'awesomebar', I'm waiting on my extensions), but I'm really more excited about some backend changes. @font-face is my 'pet bug' of the moment, I'd like to see that in Firefox 3.1. I'm also watching progress on SVG animation and SVG in img tag. I'm reasonably hopeful for seeing better and more flexible SVG support in Firefox 3.1, and it's about time.
I hope to see the html 5 video support added for Fx3.1
You're almost certainly going to get it, with Ogg Theora support at the very least (a DirectShow backend for Windows, QuickTime backend for Mac OS X, and GStreamer backend for Linux are also in the works). But the real question that no one seems to be asking is, where is HTML 5 audio support? It's just as much a part of the specification, and Ogg Vorbis is well-known enough that corporate entities aren't so worried about patents. I've seen some work on it recently, but I'm not sure it's mature enough to make the deadline. HTML 5 audio and video support in Firefox 3.1 would be a dream though. Safari already has at least some support for both, and Opera has partial support for audio with video surely not far off. Internet Explorer is obviously going to take a long time to catch up, but I guess we can't have everything...
You can keep dreaming. While Firefox 3.1 is certainly going to improve on Firefox 3.0 (Firefox 3.0 gets 71/100, Firefox 3.1 pre-alpha 1 gets 80/100, I predict Firefox 3.1 final to get 80-90/100), the aim to make changes drastic enough to make Firefox 3.1 pass Acid3 and the aim to get Firefox 3.1 released in a Q4 2008/Q1 2009 timeframe are plainly incompatible. I'd expect Acid3 to pass in Firefox 4.0 myself. Shouldn't be much of a surprise given how long it took Firefox to pass the Acid2 test, but then that never stopped us from using it. ;-)
You're probably thinking of XHTML 2.0, though img is still present there. HTML 5 came about when Apple, Mozilla, and Opera decided they didn't like where XHTML was going. They started the WHATWG, and made a draft of HTML 5. The W3C has since restarted development on HTML, and it looks like XHTML 2.0 may be dead before it's even started. HTML 5 can be formulated as XHTML anyway (XHTML 5), where we will finally dump the whole DOCTYPE pointlessness and make it clear that it's the internet media type and not the DOCTYPE that makes an XHTML document.
native support for video (in the form of the tag and a Free codec such as Ogg Theora). The latter is actually already written, but Mozilla isn't going live with it yet because of patent fears from certain large companies.
I thought that was because it just wasn't finished in time for Firefox 3.0, hence why they're implementing it in Firefox 3.1 instead. If Mozilla are worried about submarine patents, they've kept that very quiet. Apple have been quite vocal of their worries about submarine patents in Theora, while Nokia seem to have objected without knowing quite what it is they're objecting to, but Mozilla supported making it a part of the HTML 5 spec.