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Mozilla To Support H.264
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."
better live to fight tomorrow, rather than become irrelevant
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
Interesting to see Google becoming the patent trolls over H.264 that it previously warned others over and recommended WebM.
This space for rent.
"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.
Oh no! And I just spent my weekend encoding 100 TB of movies in H.265...
I don't know the status of VP8 support but many video cards/chipsets support accelerated h264 decoding taking a great deal of load off the processor. This probably isn't as important with multiple cores but it helps. This is similar to the level of support MP3 still gets due to unusual devices that can play it (ex: car stereo CD players).
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).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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...
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.
As a long time Firefox user I don't understand how Chrome can be that much better. Keep in mind I'm not like the rest of you crazies who insist on having 40 tabs open at once and never closing the program. I look at things in maybe a handful of tabs and when I'm finished I close the program. Apparently this is not normal behavior now.
I do use a few mandatory addons to make the internet workable now. Adblock, Flashblock, Ghostery, and Greasemonkey with a few scripts. Firefox has crashed maybe once for me this year. The slowest thing I notice is the ad servers and scripts that take forever. Sure hold up my page while b.scorecardresearch.com hangs. Most address like that go directly in the hosts file.
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
but you're not first... so sorry
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
No flash support makes for a lot of web content I cannot access. Dolphin works great though, I just miss out on the automatic synchronization of bookmarks like I get with FF.
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.
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.
Many people aren't thrilled with the idea of silent updates, for sure, the hassle of updating past versions was horrible. Fortunately, it's pretty easy now, and I haven't had any add-ons break since v8 or so. v13 will bring silent updates.
Finally, practicality and functionality trumps the FSF's hollow ideology. Only took them around two years to figure this out.
No, you failed to comprehend the first part of his post after your brain got hung up quoting only the second part. Re-read it.
I'm really glad to see Mozilla making the pragmatic move. I understand it's ultimately a question of their own self interest; but in this case that dovetails nicely with what's best for their customers, in my opinion.
The best of all worlds would be for Google to continue development of WebM so it reaches quality parity with h.264. Right now I think it's harder for WebM to gain traction when most of the "pro" arguments are about licensing issues and gloss over any technical deficiencies.
#DeleteChrome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfslY_AvhLw
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
There are lots of clients that Firefox runs have which have H.264. Why focus on using it for just mobile? Using pre-existing technologies on the system, regardless of its mobileness, should be the right thing to do.
Firefox is still my browser of choice for desktop. For my mobile, I use Dolphin Mini.
I was eager to use Firefox Mobile after using the desktop browser for years. I've been running it for a couple of years on Android and color me unimpressed. I do like the way they handle tabs, and I like the ability to use plugins like adblock. What I DON'T like is the terrible performance. Slow to start, laggy, prone to lock up. This is on my Galaxy S, which granted is not a brand new phone. However, FF Mobile was one of the first apps I installed and it's always been a poor performer, time and revisions haven't made it better. YMMV, but my wife has a much newer phone and it doesn't seem to run any better. I'm much more concerned about ability to browse basic websites than what video codec it uses.
Is this satire?
Notice on Youtube the lower income looking people in a trailer typically we be on a phone commenting on showing a friend a song or video clip? Same is true with minorities who are statistically poorer.
Rich people own desktops and some offices. In places like India more people go on the web with phones than desktops. This trend will continue as costs go down. Phones will be the prefered method for teenage girls to communicate and use the web even if they have a computer at home for homework.
It is not a niche and there are probably more phones than desktops. In 3 years there will be more tablets and smart phones than laptops and desktops.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
DVR - mobile can do that just fine
Game console - mobile can do that just fine
Office management - desktop wins here
Home management - desktop wins here
Communications and web browsing - mobile can do that just fine
Telephone and video chat - mobile wins here
New flash: users don't care about RAM, super-overclocked multicore 4 GHZ CPUs or any other such acronyms. They care about UI responsiveness. We've had that since the 1980s, all you need is to keep the bloat down.
Mozilla still haven't fixed Firefox to be able to handle automatic updating of language packs. Every time I update Firefox here, it reverts back to the language I installed it in (the rest of my family isn't as good as English as I am), so I have to manually go and get the newest en-GB.xpi.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Yup, it keeps you informed of what it is doing rather than doing so silently and surreptitiously.
Funny, I haven't noticed a visual change since FF4, whereupon I promptly reverted its appearance back to the FF3.6 style.
Key patents are also held by... actually, there's a list. A long one. Will all of them agree not to sue too?
By joining the pool, the ones on that list have put their patents under a common license. So as long as you buy a license from the pool, then yes, they have agreed not to sue you.
(That's no help against Google/Motorola, or patent trolls that aren't in the pool, however.)
Chrome does transparent updates...
What, it doesn't even prompt for sudo?
By what magic?
Note: /home is often mounted no-exec. So it can't cheat by installing itself there.
[...] Do we really think that its a good idea to trade in your 20" screen, full sized keyboard and fast, memory xpansive 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.[...]
Its absurd to you, so don't do it, but please don't assume the rest of us won't. I honestly prefer reading (a significant part of what I do online) on a tablet. I bought a tablet because I have a Safari Books Online subscription and didn't like reading it on my desktop or laptop, so I found myself buying books. I still prefer a book, but I've bought far fewer books since getting the tablet despite reading more.
You may argue that for reading H.264 isn't relevant, but I can tell you that my wife & kids use tablets for most of their web consumption despite all having laptops (which they prefer to desktops).
Absurd to you, but not to everyone. I'll admit, I still like my keyboard (and an MS Natural one at that) to any other input, but I'm not convinced my children would say the same.
"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."
I can't claim to have read the entire comment, but this is close enough to the comment I was going to make. Basically, I see mobile phones, and their presently non-desktop OSs as a temporary thing. I mean, can't we all agree, that 20 years from now, we'll probably be wearing some device on our body, smaller than current mobile phones, but more powerful than our current desktops? While mozilla's strategy here may be the right one, I don't think it's ridiculous to believe that they could just sit the whole android/iOS era out, and wait for the day when mobile phone computing devices effectively re-integrate with the traditional desktop devices. Eh... just a kind of zen thought that occasionally just sitting and doing nothing is a more effective strategy to conserve energy and sanity, than chasing some new fad and wasting your energy in the process.
But, yeah, firefox would be nicer if there was an _option_ to automatically download and install updates without nagging or getting in your way.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Then we'd all live in one big happy HTML 5 world.
This is a classic dumb idea, if you want to do this create do it via a plugin. The reasons for the browsers declining popularity is simple, performance...
Seriously? WHY are they figuring out licensing issues on Windows or OSX? JUST SUPPORT THE GOD DAMN SYSTEM CODECS YOU FUCKS.
Its hard to find a video card that doesn't have h.264 support for windows, OSX does naturally, so really all you have to consider is Linux where you don't really have a set of system codecs in the first place, and even if you did, you'd still not have most people with an h264 codec installed anyway due to the license flaming.
So again, WHY ARE YOU CONCERNED WITH LICENSING , just let people use what they already have instead of reinventing the wheel every 3 weeks.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
> DVR - mobile can do that just fine
Not at all. Mobile devices aren't capable of dealing with any of the various random video formats that a DVR may need to handle.
> New flash: users don't care about RAM, super-overclocked multicore 4 GHZ CPUs or any other such acronyms.
Without such a machine, their mobile device will be out of luck as it has limited ability to decode video. It needs a real PC to do all the "heavy lifting".
Never mind little things like storage and tuners.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Vimeo was the only problem I /ever/ ran into with Mozilla not supporting h.264.
Vimeo was saying it's all FireFox's fault while (correctly, imho) Firefox maintained it was Vimeo's problem. (I should note Vimeo's suggested workaround never worked for me).
Clearly Vimeo's problem for not supporting the open web and continuing to contribute to it's degredation. A real shame, because (despite some of their other asinine policies) Vimeo video quality (and community) stands head-and-shoulders above YouTube.
I can understand why Firefox is doing this, but maybe they need to relegate h.264 support as a plugin or extension. Seems to work for Flash, and I'm sure helped with the demise of Flash on the web - which is a very very good thing imo.
Nope. Actually its pretty logical. Mobile devices are great for on the go, such as in a subway. But are just lousy at home. Destops will always be the best value and experience at home. Also, i said that mobile smartphone market is unsaturated, hence the growth, eventually the growth will stop as everyone who wants to buy the phones has one, and it enters more of a replacement cycle type thing where people replace their phones when they become worn out.
I disagree on the web and the game console. It would be really sheer stupidity for something to walk into a best buy and trade say they want to trade in their 20" screen and full size keyboaerd for a 4" screen and chiclet keys.
If mobile devices had come along first, Desktop computers would be the upgrade.
The mobile devies are useful, but people misunderstand what people use them for. Its a niche device for mobile use. At home desktop is a far better user experience.
Also most users do care about value, which means, more RAM, bigger screen, big, full sized ergonomic keyboard, hard drive space and CPU speed for less money is a better value. Desktop wins here hands down.
There is for instance, huge room for expanded CPU processing for gaming, such as real time ray tracing and more realistic 3D scene generation.
I dont think many people will find watching movies on a 4" screen to be a great experience. the point is, desktops provide far better value and experience. Same for web pages. The idea of trying to read a web page on a 4" screen is lame.
Also mobile devices are lower powered, have less disk space and memory and so on than a desktop, leading to a worse user experience and less value.
I'd rather not have your corporate/government tracking and electronic body monitoring thing so I can be monitored 24 hours a day by facebook. I enjoy my privacy and being able to get away from the electronics, such as going out on a nature walk. Your idea is right out of 1984 Orwellian nigthmare. No thanks.
I have a huge 27" monitor. I have a big full size ergonomic keyboard. Terabytes of hard drive space. A nice mouse and joystick. Surround speakers. 16 GB ram. quad core 3 GHz. You can keep your tablet. I will keep my nice big desktop.
Eventually many will get tired of having to use a tiny screen (even 15" is tiny compared to my 27" monitor) and all of the inflexibilities of a tablet. They will also get tired of the carpal tunnel and taking 1 minute to type a sentance on a crappy screen or chiclet keyboard.
If tablets came first, desktops would be considered the next great thing that will replace tablet. You mean you can actually choose and replace your own mouse, keyboard and monitor? You can actually have the unit upgraded or service, even do it yourself? More RAM and functionality for less money? A much better quality screen? Far more power and resource for less money? More durable and less prone to overheating adn breakage?
Sorry but you just aren't looking far enough ahead.
In 5-10 years, your mobile device will BE your desktop. Or at least this will be the case for the majority of users.
There will be a tablet like device, with wireless connectivity for keyboard, mouse, display and inductive charging that you pick up, use on the way to work, place down on its charging pad on your desk and start using with your desktop input devices. At the end of the day, you pick up the device and go home.
You will still have your 20+ inch screen, you will still have you input devices - they'll just be used on a way more portable system.
For 99% of desktop users, the iphone or other smartphone has way more power than they need. Just as the PC killed mainframe timesharing, and the laptop killed the PC, the tablet will kill the laptop for most people. Processing that needs significantly more power will be done on "the cloud", be it a public cloud service, or a company's private cloud infrastructure.
The upshot of all this? A company buys ONE device for its workforce. Its data is stored securely on its backend server infrastructure, and the end user doesn't have to worry about syncing data or apps across multiple platforms. The pieces are all there, all that is required is a company to put them all together.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If you mean Flash, which I presume you do there's three issues:
1) That is a full out container/player. Some people just want to be able to knock a video file on their server and have people watch it, like you can do with MP3s now for music. Flash video didn't solve that.
2) Flash doesn't have its own video standard, it uses a few other codecs. Guess what one of them is, the good one, the one that is used heavily these days? Hint: It's AVC.
3) Something in Flash video only works on it. You basically have to watch it in a browser that has Flash. There's nothing else it is useful for. AVC is not only used for regular computer and mobile playback, but Blu-rays, video cameras, security systems, etc. It is a format that you can use all over the place.
Like it or not, it is the first "good enough" high def video format we've had. It does the trick in a reasonable amount of bandwidth/storage and has the features people want. Hence, it is here to stay.
Desktops are all but dead. They're strictly for office work or gaming. PC gaming is under a lot of pressure from mobile devices and game consoles. Office desktops are under a lot of pressure from laptops and virtualization. Everybody else already uses laptops. Old fogeys like me are the exception. I keep telling people about the advantages of a desktop PC (more bang for the buck, upgradeable, less prone to failure, better choice of displays, etc.), but they all buy laptops. It seems that being able to move the PC is a major selling point these days. I think it's a consequence of "the desk", a fixed location for work, being on the way out.
All I hope is that this won't make things more difficult for the iceweasel package maintainers. Firefox artwork is easy to strip away but sections of non-free code may not be.
It would be a shame to lose iceweasel due to a simple oversight.
What is the point of carrying a tablet when you're just going to use the local infrastructure? The cost of the actual CPU is a tiny fraction of the whole system cost and data won't be stored locally anyway. In the end what you describe isn't mobile vs desktop, it's cloud computing vs. everybody else.
This is hilarious btw.: "Just as the PC killed mainframe timesharing, [...] the tablet will kill the laptop [...]. Processing that needs significantly more power will be done on 'the cloud'" Not that I disagree, but it shows very nicely what's fundamentally wrong with cloud computing.
A monitor? I really hope it's not 1920x1080.
Hilarious - the post that picked up on the OP's hidden message and it gets modded as off-topic.
For those who it went WOOSH for, take the first letter of each word...
>> Firefox Is Really Struggling To (survive).
F.I.R.S.T.
The rabid geekness in this place blinds so many.
The essence of local cloud computing is already here, heaps of people are already rolling out VDI - a VDI client will work just as well on a tablet with appropriate interface devices as it will on a dumb terminal.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
most gpus/media devices made in the past years have built in h.264 decoding.
either the manufacturers were licensed and the end-user should be good to go, or they aren't and the manufacturer would be charged/fined/whatever.
all the software that encodes h.264 should be in the same boat.
from what i understand, unlike most other codecs, where the encoder is generally paid for, mpeg-la wants cash from both ends?
or they didn't charge at all but might in the future? in that case, will they still being trying from both ends or just the encoding?
what the dilly, yo?
When something does a job well, and AVC is the first thing to do this job well, people tend to latch on to it real fast. Once they are latched, it takes something pretty major to un latch them. Look at MP3. I can list a bunch of better compressed music formats. Doesn't matter, it is still by far the most popular. Why? Because it works. People got entrenched with it because it did the trick and now there's no good reason to change.
Eventually it'll be replaced, probably when there is a real useful 3D display technology, but it is going to be here for some time.
Right, just as, say, a POSTER is superior in every way to a BOOK, because the book is smaller! Clearly, people will continue buying novels in poster form for their home use... Books will only continue to be popular where people require mobility.
Personally, my smartphone has taken over 90% of my computing. A web browser on a tiny screen isn't great, but as soon as I discovered decent RSS Readers, my phone became the superior device. Admittedly, one of the reasons my smartphone is so useful is that it allows me to SSH into my DVR/Server, so there is a hold-out.
Desktops NEED MORE CPU AND RAM because programmers have gotten so incredibly lazy. I need multiple GBytes of RAM on my desktop to run a web browser... I DON'T need a fraction as much RAM in my phone to run the almost-as-capable web browser it came with. Where sheer speed can't be avoided, dedicated DSP hardware in phones does a pretty good job making up the difference. And finally, we pretty well passed the point where people can't figure out what to do with all the power their desktop has, and they're just sitting idle damn near all the time. Even video encoding isn't the burden it used-to be.
There's no question desktops are significantly more capable than a smartphone, but for how long will that be the case? People have been running Debian chrooted on Android phones for quite a while... There now exists an X11 implementation for Android. Bluetooth, wifi, and USB allows for connecting directly to all kinds of accessories, including full-sized keyboards and mice. And an increasing number of smartphones have HDMI output, so you can connect them to a TV, bigger than your computer monitor.
There's no reason a smartphone can't do 95% of everything an average person does on their computers. Will that other 5% allow desktops to hang-on? I'd be lying if I said I knew.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You wrote all those paragraphs without sufficiently addressing tablets, e.g. IPad, which has far more in common with "mobile platforms" than desktops (at least, Apple's does, though Windows 8 is a different beast, time will tell).
Needless to say, there's a convergence appearing, and the distinction between desktop and mobile may virtually disappear in time. Your efficiency arguments make logical sense from a techie perspective but are not necessarily pragmatic for the broader population. I think your analysis is much more in line with the present and past, but not really a vision of the future. In fact, the suggestion that desktops will "always be the best value and experience at home" comes off to me as rather myopic.
As the parent reply suggested, your piece is very close to satire. You are blinded by your own workflow and think that people 'tire of 15" ' laptop screens and such. But that's just you projecting your own preferences on the broader public, and it's exactly the kind of thinking that stifles creativity. I realize I'm coming off a bit harsh here - but it's clear from your posts that you are thinking in a bubble.
Sounds like you tried it once with the new numbering scheme and gave up. It's transparent now and actively maintained plugins support the new numbering.
I would like to suggest, that if Mozilla implements H.264, Mozilla should also implement free codecs that Safari or Internet Explorer implement. This example of mine only uses a royalty free codec, works in OSX Safari, but does not work in Firefox: http://jjc.freeshell.org/turning_pages.html
It uses Motion JPEG video with uncompressed PCM audio in an AVI container. Admittedly, MJPEG with PCM uses something like a factor of 40 times more bandwidth than H.264, so it is completely impractical for a site like Wikipedia or Youtube (MJPEG is however currently used, for example in Axis Network Cameras). Another possibility (which would need to be verified by lawyers) might be MPEG-1 Video with layer II audio which might be royalty free and is also supported by Safari.
In short, if Mozilla is going to support patent encumbered formats, they should also support royalty free formats that are supported by other browers.
Everybody also thought Flash was absolutely required until the iPhone came along. This is just an excuse for giving up the battle.
You are aware people make less money now than 10 years ago. If you make $35000 a 27 inch monitor is expensive. Add $80000 in student loans 700 a month for gas and 900 a month for rent and a phone or a clunker used computer is your best bet
http://saveie6.com/