Because you need to pay licensing fees measured in "millions of USD per year" if you're going to distribute software which decodes H.264.
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.