4 ms·
Mozilla isn't making any choices. supporting theora is their only option due to patents surrounding H.264. It has nothing to do with engineering, and everything
by windsurfer 17y ago
Mozilla isn't making any choices. supporting theora is their only option due to patents surrounding H.264. It has nothing to do with engineering, and everything to do with copyright and patents.
- briansmith 17y agoThey're not supporting H.264 because they don't want to promote Windows 7 (or Mac OS X) over Linux. They could easily implement H.264 support for all operating systems that license H.264, and then let websites dynamically choose what to send based on what the operating system supports. However, that means Firefox would work better on Windows 7 and Mac OS X than it would on 100% legit Linux distros.
- DrJokepu 17y agoI think this is an incredibly silly decision. Basically it boils down to "operating systems A and B support feature X while C doesn't, but we don't want operating system C to be at disadvantage so we will just disable access to feature X on A and B too."
- psadauskas 17y agoThat's already the case, though. JS performance and flash is far superior on windows than Linux already. So saying they don't want to make the windows experience better is not the case. Something like 80% of firefox users are on windows, and that's their primary target platform.
- DrJokepu 17y agoThe difference is that Mozilla could make installing a H.264 decoder plug-in from some third party source on the first occasion the browser meets a H.264 video ridiculously easy if they chosen to. They did it with Flash, for example. But they've chosen not to.
- windsurfer 17y agoEr, Flash plays H.264. They've already done that.
- DrJokepu 17y agoYes, but this discussion was about H.264 support in the <video> tag.
- windsurfer 17y agoYes, and there exists javascript libraries and user agent hacks to fix that already. My point was that this isn't an engineering problem.