Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy | Hacker News Reader

Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy

weblogs.mozillazine.org

52 pointssax25 comments

How about a more relevant analogy to Flash? It has the same insecurities and platform-dependence plus being encumbered by the same patents (and more!), but Mozilla took exactly the opposite approach!

Since 2004, Mozilla has had baked-in support for automatically installing Flash on the first encounter if the plugin is not found. A nice little yellow infobar pops down (a brilliant UI innovation), prompting you to install it with a few clicks, even without root access on both Windows and Linux.

They've also recently implemented automatic update checking for Flash. Since it's their biggest security hole, they throw up a big nasty "update now" warning on launch if you're using a known-vulnerable version. Mozilla even initially distributed the Flash binaries under license themselves via addons.mozilla.org -- I'm not sure if they still do so.

Flash is shitty, nonredistributable, closed-source, restricted-platform, proprietary, and patent-encumbered but they're willing to go to great lengths to help their users use it. Why not do the same thing for ffmpeg, which is merely patent-encumbered?

I agree with you, but a few minor points:

Flash managed to evolve with the bandwidth (and came across as sexier than Java Applets) and by doing so more and more users had it installed and eventually it got to the point where you "just could not" go to a website without being prompted to install the plugin (yes, plugin, not part of the browser core).

At this point you could not stop it (from a vendor's perspective), so run with it. With the lessons of the past in mind and HTML5 still not being widely deployed, yeah, I'd say stand your ground. And from that angle I'd say it's more similar to ActiveX than Flash.

It's semantics. But I think it was a non-bad decision to include it in the default installation procedure.

(edit: Actually, reading back, one might say that I don't agree with you! :)

Read the comments from:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...

Robert's opinion is that flash is equally evil, but dropping it would be even more damaging than never supporting h.264, so the damage is already done.

to be fair, he did pretty much copy/paste his comment from there to here. :)

And that one was a copy/paste from my late comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071727

I agree. They should be making the case for canvas, canvas-3d and SVG (SMIL) based animations with equal conviction, correct?

Hey, I wanted to meet up with you in Boulder (Qualcomm interview guy). I couldn't find your email, so I'm spamming all your comments, which is probably against the law. Please email me at ebisumaru@gmail.com, or read my longer comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078343

And thereby repeat the mistake in a different form ?. Here is an oppurtunity to make the web more 'open' and they are trying hard to do it.

And, heck, while we're at it: Flash includes a closed-source H264 decoder implementation. At this point, adding an open-source decoder would be an overall improvement.

(a brilliant UI innovation)

nit: ...though not theirs. Something that Microsoft gets little credit for.

Because Flash has 99%+ marketshare, whereas the H.264 video tag has <1% marketshare, so Mozilla are in a position to influence the latter but not the prior.

Most of the video delivered on the web today is in h.264, using Flash as a way of delivering it. This is why it's trivial for YouTube and Vimeo (and everybody else that currently uses Flash) to use h.264 in <video> -- all of their video is already in h.264.

"Flash is shitty, nonredistributable, closed-source, restricted-platform, proprietary, and patent-encumbered"

All true except the "shitty" part -- it's actually a nice little VM with some good technology and skilled people behind it. Unfortunately, Adobe ignored non-Windows/Mac for too long and alienated a lot of free software people even more.

The connection between Mozilla not supporting ActiveX and the rise of Apple, iPhone, phone browsers, and ChromeOS is tenuous at best.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1455224

I don't see how the web browser is the right place for codecs to live. I have multiple web browsers and multiple media players installed. Do I need six copies of every codec?

And that's part of the problem too. The Mozilla devs have made it next to impossible to plug in a video decoder to replace the embedded one, so there's no way to just punt the decision to the OS by passing the video to DirectShow / QuickTime / gstreamer / etc. It's Theora or nothing.

Dirac stands a good chance of being added in the near future.

It seems it would be a weekend task to add a mozilla extension that replaces <video> with embedded Microsoft Windows Media Player <object> tags, and the necessary scripting hokum.

Entirely doable, but <object> doesn't expose the same scripting APIs that <video> does. So, for instance, you will get a playable video in YouTube, but none of the YT buttons will work.

The YT buttons could be made to work because there is an analog for them, for example: document.getElementById('video').controls.pause(); does what you would expect.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd563945(VS.85).aspx

Does webkit have better support for other codecs?

Totally agree. The os should deal with codecs. A ubiquitous open format being preferable. And easy to install free codec bundles.

If they make a compromise, they should drop Flash and support H.264. I would prefer THAT choice. Flash is buggy, slow, unsecure, proprietary from a single vendor. H.264 is much more useful, has a standard, multiple implementations (hardware and software)...

All of this is rather ironic coming from a browser which isn't Free (just ask Debian about that...).

While I agree with you, you might ask the same of Debian's swirl logo. Both parties were rather petty and hypocritical.

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