Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
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Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
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Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#2The connection between Mozilla not supporting ActiveX and the rise of Apple, iPhone, phone browsers, and ChromeOS is tenuous at best.
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#3How 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?
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#4How 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…
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! :)
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#5How 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…
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.
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#6How 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…
I agree. They should be making the case for canvas, canvas-3d and SVG (SMIL) based animations with equal conviction, correct?
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#7How 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…
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. :)
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#8All of this is rather ironic coming from a browser which isn't Free (just ask Debian about that...).
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy
#10All 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.