Firefox and H.264

Brendan Eich of Mozilla:

What I do know for certain is this: H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile.

I can’t say I care too much about the non-openness of H.264, but I’m glad Mozilla does. The only thing allowing movie producers to use H.264 encoding is a “promise” that the owner of the technology won’t charge them. If it ever goes away, and all those people get charged for using H.264, I won’t have to pay directly, but the Internet will suffer as producers scramble to do something about it. That means I will be affected anyways.

Still, everyone else thinks it’s better to just move forward with H.264 because there’s already hardware that supports it.¹ Mozilla is the only one that has stood against it, and now, all Firefox users get video through Flash, instead of the native HTML5 video element like the rest of the Internet.

The goal is to allow H.264 to play, but to continue to fight for a better technology as well.

People who say this are playing blind. ↩