Windows Media now works on Firefox!

 The Windows media team has been hard at work on an updated plugin for FireFox that will enable you to watch Windows Media files within FireFox, which has now been released through Port 25 (the team at Microsoft that works on interoperability with Linux, FireFox, and the like).

Now when you go to a website with an embedded .wmv file, FireFox should automatically prompt you to install the missing plugin.  That didn't work for me (install failed), so I had to install manually, but now everything is working like a champ.

The plug-in is designed to support the following Windows platforms:

  • Windows XP SP2 (x86)
  • Windows XP SP2 (x64)
  • Windows Vista (x86)
  • Windows Vista (x64)

If you're using Mac OS X, we have had a plugin available for quite a while (thanks to the development efforts of Flip4Mac) here: https://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx

Eric Anderson (the PM in charge of this project) has some more information up on his blog about the changes, saying:

In a nutshell, here’s what we did with the new one:

  • New robust design that addresses all of the known issues with the old plug-in
  • WMP will now work in Firefox in Windows Vista
  • Support for the WMP OCX scripting interfaces

Download the FireFox Plugin Now!