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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.
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"
It's critical, even with multi-core, if for no other reason than battery life.
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.
You are are becoming the minority.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.)
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.