

Follow-up: Mozilla's stand on H.264 as ActiveX analogy - sax
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/activex_all_ove.html

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blasdel
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?

~~~
tl
Read the comments from:

[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html)

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.

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

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

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s3graham
The connection between Mozilla not supporting ActiveX and the rise of Apple,
iPhone, phone browsers, and ChromeOS is tenuous at best.

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

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bobbyi
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?

~~~
duskwuff
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.

~~~
geocar
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.

~~~
duskwuff
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.

~~~
geocar
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>

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lispm
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)...

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

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

