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."
Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Interesting)
They have recently declined to pledge that they won't sue over standards essential patents like H.264, instead of demanding 2.5% of proceeds of devices(ad revenues in this case). Apple and Microsoft have pledged this.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/regulators-to-google-you-can-buy-motorola-but-we-still-dont-trust-you.ars [arstechnica.com]
Interesting to see Google becoming the patent trolls over H.264 that it previously warned others over and recommended WebM.
Desktops becoming more relevant, mobile is a niche (Score:3, Interesting)
It is true that firefox should try to work its way onto mobile devices. There was some talk about the alternative such as the Ogg formats that were not patent encumbered, one wonders if some sort of plugin for browsers like IE would have removed a barrier to adoption.
However, I think the idea that firefox will become irrelevant if they do not make their way onto mobile is dubious, because desktops will remain the primary means of computing, for many reasons. This is due to the fact that desktops are superior and a better value overall, mobile devices are only good in a niche usage when in a car on in a subway or out and about town. However, at home in the evening, mobile devices provide a drastistically worse usage characteristics and value than desktop. Do we really think that its a good idea to trade in your 20" screen, full sized keyboard and fast, memory expansive system for a 4" screen with a chiclet sized keyboard or some overpriced tablet that gives far less computing power and reliability than a desktop system? It seems absurd to me.
I do think that desktops will be used in conjunction with a mobile device, like a smart phone and or lap/netbook and that allowing these two to share data will be important (hello, remote desktop anyone).
Smart phones are a very specific usage niche, they only really make since when one is on the go, in their car, on a subway, or walking about town. This is a trade off because the mobile device provides much worse user experience and value than a desktop, which is only tolerable where portability is important. At home, in the den, the desktops strengths vastly excel over a mobile device, and in that place the mobile has absolutely no advantage. So, desktops will be used at home, few people want to do spread sheets, work on a collage paper, play a 3D game or such on some lousy mobile device.
Another fact is that since the mobile has a smaller display and different usage characteristics, the GUI is customized for that environment, however, the GUI that works well on a mobile, such as tabs, does not work very well on the desktop where full window system is very workable. So these two classes of computing device will have different UI designs.
It is true there has been growth in the smart phone sector. However, this should not be read as these becoming more popular than desktop, but that the mobile platform is unsaturated so far so that there is more room to growth. This growth as well is due to a technological tresh-hold that has been reached recently which has made smart phones viable for purposes. However, this is a business cyle, eventually mobile sales will fall of significantly, and i expect that mobile and desktop sales will eventually equalize as people have purchased both and enter more of a long term wear out replacement cycle on mobiles as with desktops.
As well, desktops are a better value in general for computing, providing higher speeds and more RAM for lower cost. They are also a general all in one computing device which can fill the role of DVR, Game console, office management, home management, communications and web browsing, telephone and video chat from home, and so on. Doing all of this with a desktop general purpose computer is a much, much better value than buying a bunch of seperate specific purpose computers like a wii or a tivo. It is far less wasteful becuse all of these devices have a general purpose computer and it makes sense to do all of these functions with a single general purpose computer rather than 3 seperate devices. As CPU speeds have increased and RAM has increased, a single desktop computer has enough resources that gaming, DVR, and office functions can all be done simultaneously. All of this results in desktops being able to multiple things for less cost making them a better value.
Mobile devices are a niche device and eventually sales of these will decline. Desktop sales will remain steady over time due to the much better value and better and more versatile usage characteristics.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh please, it would be utterly *insane* to pledge to not sue anyone over patents because that is how the game - disgusting as it is - is currently being played by the likes of Apple (and in a more indirect and shady way, by Microsoft). People need to get over the fact that Google isn't holy and can't be the good 'do no evil' guy here as long as this patent situation is allowed to spiral out of control.
Re:What makes Chrome better? (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox has become my webapp IDE these days. Firebug (and things that let me log to firebug from the server-side code) + SQLite manager + a variety of tools for mangling http requests and responses + a variety of tools for creating your own requests, all in one tabbed application. It's perfect!
Chrome has become my web browser though.
IT's like comparing Eclipse to say, Notepad. Eclipse is useful because of everything that it CAN do. Notepad is useful for everything that it can't do (and thus doesn't get in your way when you're not doing it).
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, yes - because Google has a long patent trolling history and Mozilla is obviously at the top of their "To sue" list.
Yahoo wasn't a patent troll either, until it was [pandodaily.com]. And Mozilla would very quickly become enemy no1 at Google if they ever switched to Bing or another search engine. It'd be all-out war.
Firefox Mobile... h.264 is not your main issue. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hardware Acceleration (Score:2, Interesting)
It's critical, even with multi-core, if for no other reason than battery life.
Because firing up the GPU is such a good way to save power?
Unless you've got a review sample of the new Nvidia cards, your GPU is going to be on a larger process than your CPU and generally consume more power for the same amount of work. Power savings over GPU decoding of video content are a thing of the past, and have been for a long time. GPUs being massively parallel by nature doesn't help shit when CPUs have 4+ more cores and can selectively throttle frequency and voltage, and even power down, unused and underused cores.
Hardware decoding is useful for when the CPU can't do it, or the CPU has to ramp up to assblaster load to do so. Unless you're got a single core or first generation dual core piece of shit, this isn't the case.
Re:Glad to see it (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not really about self-interest at all.
If not supporting H.264 isn't reducing H.264 usage, but reduces the influence of Firefox by turning users away from Firefox, and increases the usage of Flash vs HTML5 video, then not supporting H.264 is a net lose for freedom and standards on the Web and supporting H.264 is the right thing to do for our mission.
Re:Will Googorola sue them? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh geez, this was not an easy one. So it reads that WebM is just a container anyways but VP8 is the only video codec it currently uses. VP8 sounds equivalent to or only slightly inferior to H.264 (which could change in WebM's favor as encoders improve). One critical thing that jumped at me was the WebM container doesn't appear to support subtitles at all. That could also change in the future.
So WebM is a container only for VP8 video and vorbis audio. H.264 is a video codec that can be used in another container like MKV.