seanmonstar

I think both Android and iOS are decent operating systems, and that they serve different kinds of people. One thing that always irks me is when people say againt Android “iOS is just better put together.” This video shows a couple examples where Android is far more cohesive than iOS is.

I’m sure Apple fans would flock and come up with examples where Android is less consistent or nice. It seems obvious to me, then, that we just leave it as each appeals to different people, and shut up about it.

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.

Google is trying to force everyone off of closed codecs like H.264 and use open codecs, like WebM. Other companies have tried to force away bad technologies, and while they were hated at first, eventually everyone realized it was a good move.

What’s surprising (perhaps it shouldn’t be), is that one of the companies to have done this previously is Apple, and yet, much of the Apple crowd have grabbed their pitchforks. It seems to me, that just like Apple, the company, those Apple fans care less about open standards, and more about Apple’s standards.¹

Update

Regarding why Google isn’t doing the same for Flash: Chrome bundles Flash for security reasons. Most people would download Flash anyways, but they likely wouldn’t bother to keep it up to date. That means their web experience would be riskier.

HTML5 video is still very new, so it’s still pretty easy to mold the direction it is going. Besides mobile devices, most web users don’t see an HTML5 video player. At this point, it makes more sense to ask, “Apple, why do I need an extra encoded version just for you?”

Looks really cool. Though, it also looks surprisingly un-Android.