Interesting enough, I'm probably one of the few people who still has some theora videos on the web in some very old blogposts of mine.
Some history for people who are not aware: Theora became somewhat popular in free software / open source circles, because at the time, it was the best codec which was believed to be either free of patents or the patents were explicitly opened up for free use. Therefore, if you were concerned about patents and their impact on free software, you'd use it. But Theora wasn't a great codec, which we always knew, it just was the best we had before google bought and opened up VP8.
It's an interesting tradeoff. Theora was never particularly popular, so you probably will have a low number of sites being impacted. But we kinda have a tradition that the web plattform rarely breaks things. You mostly can still use old html from 20-30 years ago, gif will probably stay supported in browsers forever, and I don't think there are many examples of media formats in browsers being deprecated. Even odd things like bmp are still supported.
IIRC flash was a plugin but it was integrated into chrome install. I don't remember if it was part of FF default install or not, but I can guess it wasn't.
Can't we do what Ruffle has done and just create a WebAssembly decoder for Theora? That way either the site host just needs to add a tiny piece of code to the page, or the browsee just needs to install a plugin to re-enable this functionality.
I'd gladly accept if my daily browser traded some backwards compatibility for speed, security and the ability to move forward faster.
Obviously only if I'd be certain some other browser can still open it, or maybe some emulator would be able to display it.
My earliest websites are 27 years old now (and live on a floppy disk) I'D hate to find that they're no longer readable in any software.
But I'm perfectly fine with my Firefox, with which I spend hours a day on the modern web, dropping support for that, when they need to shed some cruft or weight.
Some history for people who are not aware: Theora became somewhat popular in free software / open source circles, because at the time, it was the best codec which was believed to be either free of patents or the patents were explicitly opened up for free use. Therefore, if you were concerned about patents and their impact on free software, you'd use it. But Theora wasn't a great codec, which we always knew, it just was the best we had before google bought and opened up VP8.
It's an interesting tradeoff. Theora was never particularly popular, so you probably will have a low number of sites being impacted. But we kinda have a tradition that the web plattform rarely breaks things. You mostly can still use old html from 20-30 years ago, gif will probably stay supported in browsers forever, and I don't think there are many examples of media formats in browsers being deprecated. Even odd things like bmp are still supported.