Users of Mozilla Firefox Browser should update to the latest version of the software to get the latest features, particularly Ruby annotation support and DRM (digital rights management) technology to play high-quality videos, VentureBeat reported.
Ruby is a programming language that allows programmers to put annotation or additional text on top of the main text. It was designed and developed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan during the mid-1990s and is widely used in Chinese and Japanese publication, children's books and dictionaries.
The additional text is usually information, such as how to pronounce a character or indicate its meaning. With Ruby supported in Firefox 38, there's no need to install the Ruby HTML add-ons.
The integration of the Adobe Content Decryption Module (CDM) is said to the most awaited addition to the browser. It will allow users to play DRM-wrapped content on Windows Vista and later, including Netflix.
Mozilla doesn't really want to support DRM in Firefox and faithfully supported Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight for streaming video content. However, majority of film companies signed up and supported DRM.
To address the issue, they added CDM, which is downloaded from Adobe shortly after installing Firefox 38 or later.
"We are enabling DRM in order to provide our users with the features they require in a browser and allow them to continue accessing premium video content," explained Denelle Dixon-Thayer, Mozilla's Senior Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs in her post at Mozilla's official blog. "We don't believe DRM is a desirable market solution, but it's currently the only way to watch a sought-after segment of content."
Mozilla created a security sandbox for added layer of security around the CDM technology because "DRM is a 'black-box technology and it isn't open source," "We can't be sure how other browsers have handled the "black-box" issue but a sandbox provides a necessary layer of security."
And for those who doesn't want to have CDM in their Firefox browser, they have the option to either remove it from their copy of the browser or download the other release of Firefox with a disabled CDM.
As for Firefox 38 for Android, it also has Ruby annotation support but majority of the updates in the browser are more on improved user interface. The browser already supports the Android Lollipop theme.
Users can wait for new updates in Firefox sometime in June. Mozilla usually release a new version of the browser every six weeks.
