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

weblogs.mozillazine.org

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

#11

Post by madtantric »

blasdel wrote: post #3

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 inst…

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.

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

#13

Post by duskwuff »

blasdel wrote: post #3

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 inst…

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.

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

#14

Post by duskwuff »

bobbyi wrote: post #12

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.

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

#17

Post by doty »

blasdel wrote: post #3

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 inst…

(a brilliant UI innovation)

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

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

#18

Post by halo »

blasdel wrote: post #3

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 inst…

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.

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

#19

Post by srnm »

blasdel wrote: post #3

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 inst…

"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.

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

#20

Post by gnurant »

bobbyi wrote: post #12

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?

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