There were three options. One was to build in explicit support for h.264 in Firefox and for Mozilla to pay the MPEG-LA ~$5million/year in licensing fees. Anot

There were three options. One was to build in explicit support for h.264 in Firefox and for Mozilla to pay the MPEG-LA ~$5million/year in licensing fees. Another was to punt to the operating system and let gstreamer/directmedia/quicktime do the decode. Even though it would have been without cost to them, Mozilla chose not to do this as part of their moral stand against h.264. This was why they were so sharply criticized. The third option was to let the Firefox Flash plugin do the decoding, which is what we have today.