Mozilla Gives Up On Open Codecs, Supports H.264
Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation has blogged that Mozilla is giving up on making open codecs, unencumbered with patents and royalty issues, the standard on Firefox – for now. Firefox will now support the H.264 standard (same as used for HDTV and backed by industry heavyweights Microsoft and Apple) because it’s becoming the de facto video standard and doesn’t want to leave Firefox users out, unable to play the latest videos, while it’s competitors such as Google Chrome can. The blog reads more like a weeping lament than an announcement, so it may be good to have some hankies on standby.
A blog post by his colleague Brendan explains the more technical aspects of this decision.
Our first approach at bringing open codecs to the Web has ended up at an impasse on mobile, but were not done yet. We shouldnt beat ourselves up for somehow failing to live up to Mozillas values. Well find a way around this impasse. We have some of the worlds most creative and dedicated people working on open video and video technologies. Well rebuild the maze if we have to. Well keep working hard to bring unencumbered codecs to the Web. Well be more effective at building products people can love as we do this. We should do so proudly.
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