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."

Comments

Will Googorola sue them?

[recoiledsnake]

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.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

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. 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.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[tibman]

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.

Re:What makes Chrome better?

[i_ate_god]

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:Glad to see it

[roca]

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.