Even if/when we expose platform H.264/AAC decoding to the Web (which I think we will), we certainly aren't going to remove support for free codecs such as Vorbis, VP8 and Opus.
We want content producers to use free codecs. Given some aren't going to, we still want content producers to be *able* to use free codecs.
You've copied Microsoft's talking points but they, and you, don't make sense. For example, both of the existing proposals are codec-agnostic. The codec discussion is important and ongoing but entirely independent of anything addressed by Microsoft's proposal.
>>> I would also point out that Microsoft is following the correct W3C procedure by making a proposal and asking for comments. Being uninvolved in the public working group for two years, giving no feedback, and then suddenly dumping an entirely different proposal into the group with no warning (less than a week after the last IETF meeting) is not "correct procedure".
It's absolutely mad to compare hunger and poverty in the USA to what happens in North Korea.
When a significant percentage of Americans are eating rats, bark and grass to try to stay alive, and fleeing to Mexico to find food, then you'd have a comparable situation.
There is a lot of first-hand testimony of oppression in North Korea from people who have escaped (both victims of oppression and high-ranking officials who have defected). There are also reports from the UN, Amnesty International, and similar organizations. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_North_Korea and follow links to the sources.
No-one can visit North Korea and freely report what's going on there. The government assigns minders to all "tourists", who are always present when you talk to any locals. Of course the citizens know what will happen if they speak against the government.
The North Korean dictatorship pursues nuclear and missile weapons while its people starve. It maintains order with torture, arbitrary executions and a network of prison/slave labour camps. It sells nuclear and missile weapons technology to anyone who'll buy, making the world a more dangerous place. It is a very, very nasty regime. It blackmails countries into sending food aid by making promises to change, and then breaking them --- and aid is diverted to the military anyway. So yeah, anyone in their right mind doesn't like them.
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.
Almost everything in the "Field Guide" is supported across browsers --- which is good and proper, but it's not pointing the way to Chrome-only applications like the Infoworld article suggests.
Apparently in the Infoworld article, Chrome's "technical advantages" are NaCl and Dart (not mentioned in the "Field Guide"). NaCl is bad for the Web in multiple ways. It ties Web apps to specific processor architectures. (PNaCl is going nowhere because LLVM bitcode is not actually architecture-independent.) Worse, it creates a huge new set of Web APIs ("Pepper") for NaCl applications that mostly duplicate the functionality of the standards-based APIs we already have. This is a lot of unnecessary bloat, complexity and attack surface, plus a lot of extra standards work that would have to be done if NaCl were to be come a real cross-browser standard (which it won't, because no other browser vendor has shown interest in implementing it). The performance advantages of NaCl are overrated; C-to-JS compilers like Emscripten are rapidly improving, the JS language and implementations are rapidly improving, and for a lot of modern apps you want to be offloading to the GPU anyway.
Dart is unnecessary and will simply be overtaken by improvements to Javascript.
Machine intelligence is not required for a moon base, because robots can be teleoperated from Earth at that distance.
There are definitely a bunch of technological obstacles, mainly on the robotics side, but the work required to overcome them doesn't have to be incredibly expensive (unlike building stupidly large rockets to launch lots of mass from Earth), and it would have significant spin-off benefits on Earth.
Send robots to explore. Send robots to build a base with power supply, mining and manufacturing to build more robots. Build a bigger base with air, water and plants to eat. Then, and only then, send human colonists on a one-way trip.
csunplugged.org has many great activities to help teach computer science concepts to kids (without the distraction of using computers). I've done a couple at my kids' school and it went very well.
One interesting fact that wasn't called out in the blog post is that since Gecko's is GPU-accelerated on Windows 7, on that platform pdf.js is GPU-accelerated, unlike every other PDF viewer I know of.
Browser developers are doing tons of work to make graphics and JS incredibly fast. pdf.js leverages that.
This article is confused in so many ways, it's hard to know where to begin.
One big thing that it misses is that a lot of "HTML5" is actually writing a detailed spec for existing features that were never properly specified (e.g., HTML parsing). And a lot of the work of implementing HTML5 in a browser is to get those details right so they're the same across browsers. That helps Web authors who aren't even using any of the new features.
The list of HTML5 features has many errors. "contenteditable" is nothing to do with Web Forms and is not new in HTML5; it's been implemented in all browsers for a long time, and HTML5 just provides a (partial) spec for it. Falling back to SVG when canvas isn't available would be a mistake since every browser that supports SVG also supports canvas.
I don't know how Microsoft's "native" sloganeering got mixed up in there, because it's completely irrelevant, but let's point out that it's completely bogus. It's not even clear what they mean by "native"; the best guess is that it means "abstraction layers are bad so a browser that only runs on Windows 7 must be the best", which is complete nonsense.
John Foliot is wrong about the need for frozen spec snapshots. We often find errors in supposedly "stable" parts of the spec; if those parts are frozen in some official snapshot, that just means the snapshot is going to be more wrong than the the up-to-date version.
Web developers should always look at the latest versions of the specs for the features they use. They should decide what features to use by looking at the browser usage of their user community and making their own cost/benefit calculations.
Your understanding is incorrect. Firefox's canvas implementation has nothing to do with PNGs. And on Windows Vista/7, and also Linux/X on some systems, the 2D canvas API makes heavy use of the GPU.
>>> To borrow an analogy from Sam Harris, would Perry's appeal for divine intervention be any more insane if he asked that people communicate with God by talking in to a hairdryer?
Yes.
If an omniscient God exists, then he knows what you're thinking and all that's needed to communicate with him is to think. And that's what prayer is. The idea that talking to a hair dryer changes the situation would indeed make no sense.
So there is no issue about whether you can communicate with an omniscient God. Of course you can, if he exists. The only question is whether such a God exists.
You're quite right, except that most Christian groups (certainly most Protestant-based groups) don't want to control your mind. They want you to believe certain things, because they think those things are true. But they want your ultimate loyalty to be to God, not people or their institutions. In the Protestant tradition, you can reject the authority of any given group and still retain your salvation.
To me, that's the most useful indicator of a cult: does the group acknowledge that salvation is possible outside their particular institution? In other words, do they allow forking? Most Protestant groups do. Even the Catholic Church does these days, in a way (they see other Christian groups as definitely inferior, but acknowledge that salvation is possible with them).
The distinction is important for the same reasons forkability is important in software. Groups denying that salvation (or "enlightenment", or equivalent concepts) exists outside their institution maintain enormous power of their members, and that power is easily abused.
Not all the power of Web standards is in the hands of browser implementers --- what authors and users choose to use is important too. But certainly most of the power goes to the implementers of widely-used browsers. That's just reality. And this is why, in order to influence the Web for good, Mozilla is in the browser business.
As others have noted, we're in a much better situation now that we were in the IE6 era. Instead of one dominant engine we have three major engines with significant market share, and two of those engines are open source. So for many purposes it's really easy to be a browser implementer: just start contributing to Gecko or Webkit.
WebM is a multi-vendor standard: multiple independent implementations exist, and people outside Google have contributed to both the libvpx implementation and the evolution of the codec. Work is ongoing to publish a spec through an official standards organization.
Dark Shikari's inferences about patents are FUD. Notice that despite being an expert, he could not identify any specific patents VP8 is alleged to infringe. No-one else has either.
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Even if/when we expose platform H.264/AAC decoding to the Web (which I think we will), we certainly aren't going to remove support for free codecs such as Vorbis, VP8 and Opus.
We want content producers to use free codecs. Given some aren't going to, we still want content producers to be *able* to use free codecs.
You've copied Microsoft's talking points but they, and you, don't make sense. For example, both of the existing proposals are codec-agnostic. The codec discussion is important and ongoing but entirely independent of anything addressed by Microsoft's proposal.
>>> I would also point out that Microsoft is following the correct W3C procedure by making a proposal and asking for comments.
Being uninvolved in the public working group for two years, giving no feedback, and then suddenly dumping an entirely different proposal into the group with no warning (less than a week after the last IETF meeting) is not "correct procedure".
Is it really a good idea to give hackers so much control over one of the world's biggest cities?
It's absolutely mad to compare hunger and poverty in the USA to what happens in North Korea.
When a significant percentage of Americans are eating rats, bark and grass to try to stay alive, and fleeing to Mexico to find food, then you'd have a comparable situation.
There is a lot of first-hand testimony of oppression in North Korea from people who have escaped (both victims of oppression and high-ranking officials who have defected). There are also reports from the UN, Amnesty International, and similar organizations. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_North_Korea and follow links to the sources.
No-one can visit North Korea and freely report what's going on there. The government assigns minders to all "tourists", who are always present when you talk to any locals. Of course the citizens know what will happen if they speak against the government.
The North Korean dictatorship pursues nuclear and missile weapons while its people starve. It maintains order with torture, arbitrary executions and a network of prison/slave labour camps. It sells nuclear and missile weapons technology to anyone who'll buy, making the world a more dangerous place. It is a very, very nasty regime. It blackmails countries into sending food aid by making promises to change, and then breaking them --- and aid is diverted to the military anyway. So yeah, anyone in their right mind doesn't like them.
Here's some light reading:
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/24/us/north-korean-refugees/index.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/north-koreas-hidden-gulag/2012/04/12/gIQASJP3CT_story.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp
FWIW, Derbyshire explicitly repudiated Christianity a while back, so isn't interested in what Jesus would have to say.
The UAC prompt issue is fixed. In the latest Firefox versions it's no longer needed.
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.
This is is exactly right.
Almost everything in the "Field Guide" is supported across browsers --- which is good and proper, but it's not pointing the way to Chrome-only applications like the Infoworld article suggests.
Apparently in the Infoworld article, Chrome's "technical advantages" are NaCl and Dart (not mentioned in the "Field Guide"). NaCl is bad for the Web in multiple ways. It ties Web apps to specific processor architectures. (PNaCl is going nowhere because LLVM bitcode is not actually architecture-independent.) Worse, it creates a huge new set of Web APIs ("Pepper") for NaCl applications that mostly duplicate the functionality of the standards-based APIs we already have. This is a lot of unnecessary bloat, complexity and attack surface, plus a lot of extra standards work that would have to be done if NaCl were to be come a real cross-browser standard (which it won't, because no other browser vendor has shown interest in implementing it). The performance advantages of NaCl are overrated; C-to-JS compilers like Emscripten are rapidly improving, the JS language and implementations are rapidly improving, and for a lot of modern apps you want to be offloading to the GPU anyway.
Dart is unnecessary and will simply be overtaken by improvements to Javascript.
You can't. Microsoft simply doesn't offer a 64-bit linker that can produce 32-bit code.
Machine intelligence is not required for a moon base, because robots can be teleoperated from Earth at that distance.
There are definitely a bunch of technological obstacles, mainly on the robotics side, but the work required to overcome them doesn't have to be incredibly expensive (unlike building stupidly large rockets to launch lots of mass from Earth), and it would have significant spin-off benefits on Earth.
Send robots to explore. Send robots to build a base with power supply, mining and manufacturing to build more robots. Build a bigger base with air, water and plants to eat. Then, and only then, send human colonists on a one-way trip.
csunplugged.org has many great activities to help teach computer science concepts to kids (without the distraction of using computers). I've done a couple at my kids' school and it went very well.
IndexedDB is not "Mozilla's own". It was co-developed in the open with Google and Microsoft.
Have you tried it? It's fast.
One interesting fact that wasn't called out in the blog post is that since Gecko's is GPU-accelerated on Windows 7, on that platform pdf.js is GPU-accelerated, unlike every other PDF viewer I know of.
Browser developers are doing tons of work to make graphics and JS incredibly fast. pdf.js leverages that.
That is generally true but sometimes you could do it either way and get better performance with canvas.
This article is confused in so many ways, it's hard to know where to begin.
One big thing that it misses is that a lot of "HTML5" is actually writing a detailed spec for existing features that were never properly specified (e.g., HTML parsing). And a lot of the work of implementing HTML5 in a browser is to get those details right so they're the same across browsers. That helps Web authors who aren't even using any of the new features.
The list of HTML5 features has many errors. "contenteditable" is nothing to do with Web Forms and is not new in HTML5; it's been implemented in all browsers for a long time, and HTML5 just provides a (partial) spec for it. Falling back to SVG when canvas isn't available would be a mistake since every browser that supports SVG also supports canvas.
I don't know how Microsoft's "native" sloganeering got mixed up in there, because it's completely irrelevant, but let's point out that it's completely bogus. It's not even clear what they mean by "native"; the best guess is that it means "abstraction layers are bad so a browser that only runs on Windows 7 must be the best", which is complete nonsense.
John Foliot is wrong about the need for frozen spec snapshots. We often find errors in supposedly "stable" parts of the spec; if those parts are frozen in some official snapshot, that just means the snapshot is going to be more wrong than the the up-to-date version.
Web developers should always look at the latest versions of the specs for the features they use. They should decide what features to use by looking at the browser usage of their user community and making their own cost/benefit calculations.
Your understanding is incorrect. Firefox's canvas implementation has nothing to do with PNGs. And on Windows Vista/7, and also Linux/X on some systems, the 2D canvas API makes heavy use of the GPU.
>>> To borrow an analogy from Sam Harris, would Perry's appeal for divine intervention be any more insane if he asked that people communicate with God by talking in to a hairdryer?
Yes.
If an omniscient God exists, then he knows what you're thinking and all that's needed to communicate with him is to think. And that's what prayer is. The idea that talking to a hair dryer changes the situation would indeed make no sense.
So there is no issue about whether you can communicate with an omniscient God. Of course you can, if he exists. The only question is whether such a God exists.
Would having significantly fewer books and movies be a bad thing?
Maybe we'd be spared the thousands of Harry Potter wannabees. Maybe movie theatres wouldn't be flooded with sequels and remakes.
There are far more books and movies produced than anyone can read or watch. We should be thinking about quality, not quantity.
You're quite right, except that most Christian groups (certainly most Protestant-based groups) don't want to control your mind. They want you to believe certain things, because they think those things are true. But they want your ultimate loyalty to be to God, not people or their institutions. In the Protestant tradition, you can reject the authority of any given group and still retain your salvation.
To me, that's the most useful indicator of a cult: does the group acknowledge that salvation is possible outside their particular institution? In other words, do they allow forking? Most Protestant groups do. Even the Catholic Church does these days, in a way (they see other Christian groups as definitely inferior, but acknowledge that salvation is possible with them).
The distinction is important for the same reasons forkability is important in software. Groups denying that salvation (or "enlightenment", or equivalent concepts) exists outside their institution maintain enormous power of their members, and that power is easily abused.
Not all the power of Web standards is in the hands of browser implementers --- what authors and users choose to use is important too. But certainly most of the power goes to the implementers of widely-used browsers. That's just reality. And this is why, in order to influence the Web for good, Mozilla is in the browser business.
As others have noted, we're in a much better situation now that we were in the IE6 era. Instead of one dominant engine we have three major engines with significant market share, and two of those engines are open source. So for many purposes it's really easy to be a browser implementer: just start contributing to Gecko or Webkit.
WebM is a multi-vendor standard: multiple independent implementations exist, and people outside Google have contributed to both the libvpx implementation and the evolution of the codec. Work is ongoing to publish a spec through an official standards organization.
Dark Shikari's inferences about patents are FUD. Notice that despite being an expert, he could not identify any specific patents VP8 is alleged to infringe. No-one else has either.