Digital Signage software: Firefox 3.6

Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 4:30 pm by DigitalSignageBlog, 0 Comments »

For those of you who didn’t know, there are quite a number of digital signage players in the market that are using Mozilla Firefox on the Linux platform as their default browser to play content. To the viewer, this does not become apparent since the developers cleverly designed the application to run in full screen so when content is played you don’t see the tool and menu bars.

One of the many reasons why most digital signage companies are using Firefox compared to Internet Explorer is due to the fact Firefox is open source and comes with many add-ons. One of these add-ons is the ability to run the application in Kiosk or Digital Signage mode. The other obvious point is that it’s free and comes packaged with many Unix based OSes.

Now, Mozilla has just recently released Firefox version 3.6 which is meant to be quite an improvement in performance and features. According to Firefox loading web pages is much faster and uses less CPU. To be honest I haven’t really made any measurements but I haven’t noticed any differences in performance when using Windows XP. Looking at my task manager it still uses like 198,252K of memory – is this a memory leak. Is this normal?

Firefox memory leak

There’s also this new type of theme called personas, which allow users to change the appearance of Firefox. This feature doesn’t really help with digital signage applications.

Now, one of the features which will definitely help the digital signage community is that open native video can now be displayed in full screen and also supports poster frames. Visit the firefox website for more information.