Things I don't understand:
* Fork?
* H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin?
Why aren't these valid solutions?
* Fork?
* H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin?
Why aren't these valid solutions?
It's purposefully architected to make a plugin very unsavory — you could do it with a plugin/extension that inspected every DOM for failed <video> embeds, dynamically replacing them with an <embed> of its own NSAPI plugin. You'd be guaranteed to get FOUC, poor detectablity, and regular breakage. At that point the author is better off just seamlessly falling back to Flash.
I'd like a citation for this please, or at least some synthesis based on some explicit rationale (which is what I expected on the with that em dash, instead of a non-sequitur).
This was made explicit when us proles discovered that Mozilla has had a GStreamer <video> implementation for two years, for use in their mobile port so that they have a hope of playing video in real time:
> My exclusive focus for this GStreamer integration has been to make it work with Fennec. Not enabling it in Firefox on platforms where GStreamer has been ported to, is as far as I know a political decision. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540#c105
Architecting against plugins is not new in the free software community. RMS purposefully designed GCC so that you couldn't interface with its internal representations to make it impossible to have independent language frontends, optimizers, or target backends. That led directly to ECGS, a complete fork of GCC away from the FSF's control after they let it languish and refused patches — the FSF lost and eventually blessed it as the 'real' GCC. Its closed architecture is the primary motive behind LLVM's ascendancy.
It's like a shareholder owned corporation deciding that making money is someone else's problem.
My problem with comments like the one I was replying to is that they refuse to see this; there is an easy solution to the financial issue of codec licensing, but it keeps getting thrown out as a red herring, when the focus should be on whether Mozilla's ideological stance is a good thing.
Nah, just hadn't read up/thought about the issue enough, thanks for explaining. I'm actually a bit of a supporter of software patents, as they give business reason to invest boatloads of money in things like H.264 to begin with.
Only Windows 7 does.
Mozilla is asking us to side with them based purely on ideology and an impact to their bottom line as a corporation. And Mozilla is not a tiny garage operation anymore.