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Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan explains why it was important to support Ogg in Firefox

6 points by nickb 18y ago

unalone 18y ago
Bloggers really have to learn to edit their posts. Not even as a disagreement with "open for open's sake" but as a matter of writing quality in general. Bloggers just don't write well. "To reach the rest, we will keep turning people into Firefox users, and pressure Apple, Microsoft and other vendors to support Vorbis and Theora." That's a complete waste of a sentence. "To get people who don't use our product to use this format, we will make them use our product." "Isn't Theora inferior to H.264, so no-one will use it? Theora isn't bad on an absolute scale --- look at some demos to see for yourself." Can't they just say that it's inferior, and say it straight out? Double talk fools nobody. Something like "It's inferior, but not by much - and a growing community online is trying to use entirely open formats. (Try it yourself here.)" "Even if it's slightly lower quality than H.264 at some bit rates, it's still going to be very useful to people who favour free formats on principle, or who need an open-source solution, or who want a solution that Just Works across platforms without plugins, or who just want a solution without licensing fees --- for example, if you just want a convenient way to use a video clip in a Web app." First off - DO you have to pay Adobe to use Flash commercially? I was not aware of this. Second - liking something just because it's free is and always will be stupid. People don't use Firefox because it's free. They use it because they think it's the best browser, and by some arguments it is. Similarly, a post like this would serve better purpose to be open about the practical advantages of Ogg, rather than to try and preach to the masses. This is something that I've become increasingly annoyed with over the last few months regarding the Firefox team: they've become less like visionaries and more like evangelists. Reading this was like seeing Firefox's download page for 3: the See How We Stack Up comparison with Safari. Compatible with modern Web pages and technologies - both Active security features like anti-phishing and anti-malware - Firefox Battle-tested security process and the industry’s fastest response times - Firefox Thousands of ways to personalize your online experience - Firefox 100% free and open source software - Firefox That is a pure propaganda bit and Mozilla knows it. The important bit is the compatibility, and by Acid3 standards, Firefox is LESS compatible than Safari (and Webkit blows it away, of course). The quick response times is really a tie. "Battle-tested" means nothing. I know people like plug-ins, but "online experience" is another marketing term. It doesn't really matter in terms of competition whether or not something is open source, but Safari IS "100% free." "Active security features" is legitimate, but that's only one point in Firefox's advantage, and - of course - they leave out Safari's advantages as well. While I know this is standard practice for competition, Firefox would win me over much more if they cut the crap and were honest about "Okay, you might like us more IF you do the following things a lot, and you might NOT like us if you do such-and-such." This point, and my following points about aesthetic of writing, don't seem to bother many other people here. The art of honesty is one that doesn't hold much water online, so it seems. People online are much happier with imprecision and selective dishonesty than they should be, and it's something that worries me about developing culture. That's my main argument; what follows is merely aesthetic nitpicking rather than nitpicking on content. "Vendor pressure must come from content providers dedicated to making compelling content available in free formats (coupled with a superior playback experience in Firefox)." This sentence is just terrible and seems to shift subject and tense as it does. Vendor pressure - the noun here seems like it should be vendor, but it's pressure - must come from content providers - an empty term - dedicated to making compelling content - compelling is compelling regardless of format - available in free formats - but, of course, this is self-obvious (because, the "pressure" is the pressure to use open formats; therefore, any pressure to use open formats must come from open format users) - coupled with a superior playback experience in Firefox - not only is "experience" a terrible word that's overused in this post, but this post should have to do with Ogg Vorbis and not promoting Firefox. That hurts the cause of Ogg, when its promoter is only promoting it to promote itself. "This is a great example of why Mozilla and Firefox are important. The Web needs a high-market-share browser vendor committed to free software and open standards across the board." This is not a great example, because open formats are not necessarily important, never have been, and most likely never will be. They've been nice, of course, but they're always an added luxury rather than a main feature. The web does not "need" these things. It might "benefit from" them, but it does not need them. Also, needless to say, there's so much fluff in this sentence. This writer is terrible. "The answer is simple" Yes, but it wasn't explained simply. And it's funny, as an afterthought, because almost every programmer I know is precise with language to a fault. The person writing this is not writing as a programmer. He is not writing from a logical point of view. He is writing as a marketer, which almost guarantees that he knows he's being deceptive with his language. Here's how he could have written that post and made it shorter but better. "Matt Asay doesn't understand why shipping Ogg Vorbis and Theora in Firefox is important. The answer is simple. Open video/audio formats are not widely supported as of yet - and we believe that open formats help keep the web free and equal. By giving 100 million users Ogg support, we're making it a format that's less risky for developers, which may pressure other companies into supporting the format as well. "Is Ogg equal to H.264? Not quite, but it's good - check it out for yourself. And quality is only improving. We would love to offer open codecs for H.264 in the meantime, but until something changes, we can't. "Wasn't this already available on Firefox? Yes - but as a plugin. We feel that supporting Ogg out-of-the-box meant one less step for the end user - and that means that overall, Ogg is a hundred million steps closer to being an actual alternative format. Making formats difficult to use is bad for everybody, even developers and users that prefer other formats." Of course, Mozilla wouldn't mention usability nowadays, since usability design isn't nearly as high a priority as it was even with Firefox 2.
- akd 18y ago
  You blame the post for being wordy and complex and then you post something like this...
  - unalone 18y ago
    :-) Seriously, though... the difference is that mine is straight to the point. There's a time for lengthy posts, and criticizing another post in-depth requires length. The difference, I'd think, is that my post doesn't mince words, doesn't repeat itself, and tries to make relevant points with a minimum of rambling.
felixmar 18y ago
I think it's great that Mozilla is promoting royalty free technologies. RAND licensing is fine if you're a megacorp, but for smaller companies and especially startups it can be a big hurdle. And the 'reasonable' part is often questionable in the technical sense when many patents are pretty trivial or should not have been granted at all.

6 points by nickb 18y ago

Bloggers really have to learn to edit their posts. Not even as a disagreement with "open for open's sake" but as a matter of writing quality in general. Bloggers just don't write well. "To reach the rest, we will keep turning people into Firefox users, and pressure Apple, Microsoft and other vendors to support Vorbis and Theora." That's a complete waste of a sentence. "To get people who don't use our product to use this format, we will make them use our product." "Isn't Theora inferior to H.264, so no-one will use it? Theora isn't bad on an absolute scale --- look at some demos to see for yourself." Can't they just say that it's inferior, and say it straight out? Double talk fools nobody. Something like "It's inferior, but not by much - and a growing community online is trying to use entirely open formats. (Try it yourself here.)" "Even if it's slightly lower quality than H.264 at some bit rates, it's still going to be very useful to people who favour free formats on principle, or who need an open-source solution, or who want a solution that Just Works across platforms without plugins, or who just want a solution without licensing fees --- for example, if you just want a convenient way to use a video clip in a Web app." First off - DO you have to pay Adobe to use Flash commercially? I was not aware of this. Second - liking something just because it's free is and always will be stupid. People don't use Firefox because it's free. They use it because they think it's the best browser, and by some arguments it is. Similarly, a post like this would serve better purpose to be open about the practical advantages of Ogg, rather than to try and preach to the masses. This is something that I've become increasingly annoyed with over the last few months regarding the Firefox team: they've become less like visionaries and more like evangelists. Reading this was like seeing Firefox's download page for 3: the See How We Stack Up comparison with Safari. Compatible with modern Web pages and technologies - both Active security features like anti-phishing and anti-malware - Firefox Battle-tested security process and the industry’s fastest response times - Firefox Thousands of ways to personalize your online experience - Firefox 100% free and open source software - Firefox That is a pure propaganda bit and Mozilla knows it. The important bit is the compatibility, and by Acid3 standards, Firefox is LESS compatible than Safari (and Webkit blows it away, of course). The quick response times is really a tie. "Battle-tested" means nothing. I know people like plug-ins, but "online experience" is another marketing term. It doesn't really matter in terms of competition whether or not something is open source, but Safari IS "100% free." "Active security features" is legitimate, but that's only one point in Firefox's advantage, and - of course - they leave out Safari's advantages as well. While I know this is standard practice for competition, Firefox would win me over much more if they cut the crap and were honest about "Okay, you might like us more IF you do the following things a lot, and you might NOT like us if you do such-and-such." This point, and my following points about aesthetic of writing, don't seem to bother many other people here. The art of honesty is one that doesn't hold much water online, so it seems. People online are much happier with imprecision and selective dishonesty than they should be, and it's something that worries me about developing culture. That's my main argument; what follows is merely aesthetic nitpicking rather than nitpicking on content. "Vendor pressure must come from content providers dedicated to making compelling content available in free formats (coupled with a superior playback experience in Firefox)." This sentence is just terrible and seems to shift subject and tense as it does. Vendor pressure - the noun here seems like it should be vendor, but it's pressure - must come from content providers - an empty term - dedicated to making compelling content - compelling is compelling regardless of format - available in free formats - but, of course, this is self-obvious (because, the "pressure" is the pressure to use open formats; therefore, any pressure to use open formats must come from open format users) - coupled with a superior playback experience in Firefox - not only is "experience" a terrible word that's overused in this post, but this post should have to do with Ogg Vorbis and not promoting Firefox. That hurts the cause of Ogg, when its promoter is only promoting it to promote itself. "This is a great example of why Mozilla and Firefox are important. The Web needs a high-market-share browser vendor committed to free software and open standards across the board." This is not a great example, because open formats are not necessarily important, never have been, and most likely never will be. They've been nice, of course, but they're always an added luxury rather than a main feature. The web does not "need" these things. It might "benefit from" them, but it does not need them. Also, needless to say, there's so much fluff in this sentence. This writer is terrible. "The answer is simple" Yes, but it wasn't explained simply. And it's funny, as an afterthought, because almost every programmer I know is precise with language to a fault. The person writing this is not writing as a programmer. He is not writing from a logical point of view. He is writing as a marketer, which almost guarantees that he knows he's being deceptive with his language. Here's how he could have written that post and made it shorter but better. "Matt Asay doesn't understand why shipping Ogg Vorbis and Theora in Firefox is important. The answer is simple. Open video/audio formats are not widely supported as of yet - and we believe that open formats help keep the web free and equal. By giving 100 million users Ogg support, we're making it a format that's less risky for developers, which may pressure other companies into supporting the format as well. "Is Ogg equal to H.264? Not quite, but it's good - check it out for yourself. And quality is only improving. We would love to offer open codecs for H.264 in the meantime, but until something changes, we can't. "Wasn't this already available on Firefox? Yes - but as a plugin. We feel that supporting Ogg out-of-the-box meant one less step for the end user - and that means that overall, Ogg is a hundred million steps closer to being an actual alternative format. Making formats difficult to use is bad for everybody, even developers and users that prefer other formats." Of course, Mozilla wouldn't mention usability nowadays, since usability design isn't nearly as high a priority as it was even with Firefox 2.

akd 18y ago
You blame the post for being wordy and complex and then you post something like this...
- unalone 18y ago
  :-) Seriously, though... the difference is that mine is straight to the point. There's a time for lengthy posts, and criticizing another post in-depth requires length. The difference, I'd think, is that my post doesn't mince words, doesn't repeat itself, and tries to make relevant points with a minimum of rambling.

felixmar 18y ago

I think it's great that Mozilla is promoting royalty free technologies. RAND licensing is fine if you're a megacorp, but for smaller companies and especially startups it can be a big hurdle. And the 'reasonable' part is often questionable in the technical sense when many patents are pretty trivial or should not have been granted at all.