Microsoft Releases Media Player for Firefox

Microsoft Corp., as part of its outreach to the open-source community, has released a new official Windows Media Player plug-in for Firefox 2.0 that resolves problems with the older one.

The plug-in enables Windows Media Player to work on Firefox for Windows Vista and resolves known issues with the old one, wrote Hank Janssen, the program manager for Port 25, Microsoft's software lab that works with open source, on a company blog Monday.

The plug-in, available on Firefox's add-on site, is compatible with the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the XP SP2 and Vista OSes.

The plug-in is backwards compatible with Windows Media Player version 6.4 and also adds support for Windows OCX scripting interfaces, which allows developers to add more functionality to applications.

Microsoft is working on another plug-in for Firefox, the main competitor to the company's latest Internet Explorer 7 browser. In November, the Port 25 lab said it was working with Mozilla Corp. to develop a plug-in for CardSpace, Microsoft's identity management technology.

Firefox 3.0, the next upgrade of the browser, is scheduled for release later this year.