"The beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion."

Tim Anderson on The Register attempts to make the argument that, contrary to what the Firefox crew says, Firefox 3.5 is "not a 'web upgrade.'" But after looking at the developer documentation and messing with the browser over the past few days, I have to disagree.

Given the functionality of HTML 5 and Firefox' decision to go ahead with embedding video, a rush to HTML 5 could mean that pages no longer need to be riddled with Flash embeds. SVG images could be rendered directly by the browser, graphs could be contained entirely within a canvas element and video could be directly embedded instead of rendered via an embedded plugin.

Think about how awesome that could end up being. Homestar Runner definitely isn't going to start being animated in HTML 5 instead of Flash - Adobe's tool support is light years away for people wanting production-quality interactive applications; yet for simple things like graphs, videos and visualization of data Firefox 3.5 brings a future HTML specification finally in reach with no extra plugins required.