Mozilla Adds H.264 Support To Android Firefox 77
sl4shd0rk writes "Chris Double of the Mozilla developer team has (H.264, AAC and MP3) working with the Android version of Firefox on a Nexus S handset. Although a preliminary patch, it looks like it is on track to be included in Firefox 17, which will enter the Aurora channel at the end of the month. It will be some time before being made available to users, so hang in there. A very welcome addition. Thanks Chris!"
Not good news (Score:2, Insightful)
Distributing software that can decode H.264 costs money.
Making H.264 the de facto standard means only rich companies will be able to develop web browsers (or other devices/services that play H.264).
Would we have had the same amount of competition if other web formats/standards required paying licenses? (stuff like JPG, PNG, GIF, JS, ...)
Re:Sanity prevails (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a battle we can win.
Everyone is using h.264. Not supporting it just makes your product inferior as it won't support as many websites as one that does.
We are just going to have to deal with it. Eventually the patents will expire and it will no longer be a problem; we just have to make the mistake of not choosing an encumbered standard NEXT TIME once h.264 is obsolete.
Re:Sanity prevails (Score:4, Insightful)
on the desktop both windows and osx have an integrated h264 decoder, on linux is probably just a matter of installing ffmpeg or something like that