Mozilla To Support H.264 249
suraj.sun writes with a followup to last week's news that Mozilla was thinking about reversing their stance on H.264 support. Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker and CTO Brendan Eich have now both written blog posts explaining why they feel H.264 support is no longer optional. Eich wrote, "We will not require anyone to pay for Firefox. We will not burden our downstream source redistributors with royalty fees. We may have to continue to fall back on Flash on some desktop OSes. I’ll write more when I know more about desktop H.264, specifically on Windows XP. What I do know for certain is this: H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile. Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance." Baker added, "Our first approach at bringing open codecs to the Web has ended up at an impasse on mobile, but we’re not done yet. ... We'll find a way around this impasse."
Good move (Score:5, Insightful)
better live to fight tomorrow, rather than become irrelevant
Failure? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance."
Yes, because 60 kB/s mobile browsing sure is the future for the internet. Please, 80% of our daily lives are spend around laptop or desktop computers. I use mobile browsing once a month, and couldn't care less about it. It's clunky, without proper screen, and useless as most of what you want out of your smartphone is in app form already (maps, nav, market, etc).
Start making your browser better and stop caring about this kind of pointless thing.
And no, I wasn't addressing you smartphone junkies with your $80 dollar a month plan and your 2 MB/s. I'm gonna go ahead and put that $50/month in my pocket, drinking coffee behind my laptop as I watch you struggle with a touchscreen keyboard on a 5 inch screen.
I don't understand the opposition (Score:5, Insightful)
We currently use MPEG1, MPEG2, and JPEG in our browsers (and TVs) but the world has not collapsed, or our personal savings wiped out.
I don't see any problem with moving onward with MPEG4 audio and video (AACplusSBR)(h.264)(ATSC 2008).
Re:Hardware Acceleration (Score:5, Insightful)
It's critical, even with multi-core, if for no other reason than battery life.
Re:not a troll (Score:3, Insightful)
What made it worse was Firefox really messed up when they did that crazy version numbers issue just to copy Google chrome as if the Version Number was the key to success. What that did was Show how desperate Firefox is, then their choice to snub their noses at valid complaints from business usage just made it worse.
So, Mozilla copying Google's version numbering scheme and release schedule made Firefox *worse* than Chrome? Okay, then...
OSS advocacy or maybe zealotry (Score:5, Insightful)
They wanted a completely patent and royalty free standard. Now I can accept that is the preferable way to go but it wasn't very practical. The problem was nobody in the open and unpatented world wanted to get their shit together and develop a next gen video format in a timely fashion. So AVC got standardized and started to get implemented everywhere since it gives quite good quality/bit. Once it was huge and implemented in near everything, there was movement to create an open standard but too little, too late. When standards get entrenched, they get entrenched hard. GIFs are a great example, people still use them all over despite PNG being more or less in every way superior.
Well FF wanted to fight back against that and so said "No AVC evar!" They backed WebM, which had Google gotten done 3-5 years earlier, might have had a shot, but they are finding it just isn't feasible.
So AVC is what we have now, and probably will for a long, long time. When the next better standard comes out, it'll be hard to get people to switch because AVC is "good enough". We finally have a "good enough" video streaming solution, meaning it offer the kind of quality we want and can do so in bandwidth we have.
Re:Failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mobile Smart Phone popularity is due to the face that you can bring it with you almost anywhere. Even an Ultra Portable Laptop has places where you would be looked at kinda funny if you took it with you, and the extra power of the laptop comes at a cost of battery life. A Smart Phone under moderate use gives you about 16 hours a day. A Laptop under that use gives you 3-5 hours. Also the Mobile Network is handy to get data when you are not near any other hot spots. Which does happen more often then you think. I got a smart phone figuring that it would be a fun toy... But I found it more useful then I thought.
I still don't think..... (Score:2, Insightful)
What about, for example, wanting to show a video with certain mandatory commercial points during the main video, which the user cannot skip? Not that I'm a big fan of this, but at the same time I can respect that a company might still find this sort of thing desirable.
You can get a flash video player to do this easily, but to the best of my understanding, can't be done so easily with just html5 and a <video> tag. Not that I'm so in love with Flash.... but I really wish there was a solution to this.
Re:not a troll (Score:2, Insightful)
So, Mozilla copying Google's version numbering scheme and release schedule made Firefox *worse* than Chrome? Okay, then...
Actually yes. Version upgrades in chrome are transparent to the user. I don't care if chrome updates to version 324...I don't know even know what version of chrome I'm running.
When firefox updates, it make you go through a huge hassle of clicking approve on update boxes, checking to see if your extensions are broken, realizing half your extensions ARE broken, looking for new ones, etc. If they made their upgrades as transparent as chrome does, it wouldn't be a problem. But a rapid release schedule is a terrible idea when upgrading is a hassle.
Re:not a troll (Score:2, Insightful)
What made it worse was Firefox really messed up when they did that crazy version numbers issue just to copy Google chrome as if the Version Number was the key to success. What that did was Show how desperate Firefox is, then their choice to snub their noses at valid complaints from business usage just made it worse.
So, Mozilla copying Google's version numbering scheme and release schedule made Firefox *worse* than Chrome? Okay, then...
Chrome does transparent updates... not only are you not prompted to update, but you usually don't even know you've updated unless you check the revision number.
To contrast, Firefox not only gives you a dialog saying "Firefox updated, restart Firefox!" but also follows this with an in-your-face addon-compatibility dialog the first time the new version starts.
Oh, and Firefox changes something in the visual style every other version or so.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or better yet... why doesn't Firefox on Android use the standard, pre-licensed, OS library to play back h.264?
All Android devices support h.264 playback these days and it's baked into Android's media playback architecture, so it's prelicensed by the device manufacturer.
I don't think an app needs to pay in order to use h.264 playback if it's already been paid for and provided for everyone else to use.
Heck, Firefox on regular PCs can do the same - Windows 7 supports it, and I'm sure Firefox could leverage other plugins like QuickTime to support h.264 playback on other OSes (really, Apple's giving away a h.264 decoder, for free. Licensed that they have to pay for! Each download costs Apple money!)
Not sure what they want to do with Boot 2 Gecko though, since there won't be a pre-licensed library already.
Re:Failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am pretty sure my mom uses her phone for web browsing more than she does her desktop. She always had a hatred for desktops, but she finds her slow, 2nd gen 2.1 crappy android phone rather likable for some reason.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox is free to final users, but someone (Google at least) is definitely footing the bill.
Google is paying for access to Firefox users through search bar and default home page. They are not supporting Firefox out of kindness.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly my understanding of what they're doing. They're not licensing it themselves, they're just going to rely on the OS implementaiton where one exists.