4 ms·

How can they not point out the elephant in the room? Not having H.264 support is a deal-killer for some users, and this is going to increase. As a user, this me

How can they not point out the elephant in the room? Not having H.264 support is a deal-killer for some users, and this is going to increase. As a user, this means I either see HTML5 video as broken, or I get noticeably worse quality at the same bit-rate. This is symbolic of internal forces in the product leading to decisions that no users actually want.

mclin 16y ago
Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash. Probably most will choose flash over ogg. You think any site wouldn't include a flash fallback when IE has 60% of the market? Anyone with flash installed won't notice a thing.
- WilliamLP 16y ago
  > Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash. For now. When IE9 comes out it will start to become a viable business solution to develop for H.264 / HTML5 with no Flash. This may be a sweet spot for development effort versus benefit as it may be more costly to ignore legacy IE and Firefox users than to ignore iPhone and iPad. Users don't care about a proprietary web, they care about web sites working. It's already alarming to try Youtube in experimental mode in Firefox and have it not work at all for most videos. This is supposed to be a modern cutting edge browser, right?
  - mclin 16y ago
    I haven't tried this, but it looks pretty easy to do both. At least for using flash for the the video features provided by html5 http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
shadowsun7 16y ago
I don't think H.264 is dealbreaker yet. Too few people even know (or care) about coming video standards - the only people I know who even think about such matters are geeks (aka people like you and me). Your point on this being symbolic of internal forces in the product, on the other hand, sounds largely correct.
deleted 16y ago
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nitrogen 16y ago
I think that external forces (patent restrictions) are as much an issue as internal forces. Choosing to adhere to Free software principles and avoid legally risky (for Firefox), patented technology is just as valid a strategy as licensing the codec and using closed source bits (Chrome).
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
So the users want a web built on proprietary standards? If Mozilla had internal forces that listened to those users when it started then it wouldn't have the several hundred million users, and multi-million yearly income that it currently has.

mclin 16y ago

Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash. Probably most will choose flash over ogg. You think any site wouldn't include a flash fallback when IE has 60% of the market? Anyone with flash installed won't notice a thing.

WilliamLP 16y ago
> Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash. For now. When IE9 comes out it will start to become a viable business solution to develop for H.264 / HTML5 with no Flash. This may be a sweet spot for development effort versus benefit as it may be more costly to ignore legacy IE and Firefox users than to ignore iPhone and iPad. Users don't care about a proprietary web, they care about web sites working. It's already alarming to try Youtube in experimental mode in Firefox and have it not work at all for most videos. This is supposed to be a modern cutting edge browser, right?
- mclin 16y ago
  I haven't tried this, but it looks pretty easy to do both. At least for using flash for the the video features provided by html5 http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

shadowsun7 16y ago

I don't think H.264 is dealbreaker yet. Too few people even know (or care) about coming video standards - the only people I know who even think about such matters are geeks (aka people like you and me). Your point on this being symbolic of internal forces in the product, on the other hand, sounds largely correct.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

nitrogen 16y ago

I think that external forces (patent restrictions) are as much an issue as internal forces. Choosing to adhere to Free software principles and avoid legally risky (for Firefox), patented technology is just as valid a strategy as licensing the codec and using closed source bits (Chrome).

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

So the users want a web built on proprietary standards? If Mozilla had internal forces that listened to those users when it started then it wouldn't have the several hundred million users, and multi-million yearly income that it currently has.