Mozilla Adds H.264 Support To Android Firefox

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!"

WebM

[Tufriast]

No offense, but what happened to the "WebM is super double plus good, and all we're gonna nom-nom on" dogma that was touted? I'm happy that they are adding support for H.264, but after all this baby mama drama, what was the point? I'm wondering what happened internally to reverse this choice. Was it a matter of "the world has moved on" or "we're just gonna make the best UX possible" that drove the decision?

Re:WebM

[tlhIngan]

No offense, but what happened to the "WebM is super double plus good, and all we're gonna nom-nom on" dogma that was touted? I'm happy that they are adding support for H.264, but after all this baby mama drama, what was the point? I'm wondering what happened internally to reverse this choice. Was it a matter of "the world has moved on" or "we're just gonna make the best UX possible" that drove the decision?

Probably practicality.

First, it's mobile Firefox, not main desktop Firefox. Effectively all smartphones these days support h.264 in hardware, and the OS provides native hooks to use that hardware support. Very few mobiles support WebM out of the box in hardware, which means a software decoder, which either means very limited resolutions (back to ye olde QVGA video days - show off your fancy high res 720p screen with blocky pixellated video!), high power draw (why is my phone getting so hot and my battery life down to 1 hour?), and lousy framerates.

Nevermind that the mix of various mobile GPUs out there coupled with ancient versions of Android could easily mean that reusing the h.264 hardware for WebM would be tricky.

And given that the default browser supports HTML5 video right off the bat, Firefox was just going to get dinged on its inability to play video.

WebM on the desktop though remains a possibility - where big beefy power hungry CPUs are available, wall power is available, and flexible video cards with up-to-date drivers and OSes mean even software decode will have hardware assistance.