On 13/03/2012 10:30 a.m., Robert O'Callahan wrote:
> We held the line in the hope that the industry would follow, and that
> Google would do a lot to improve and support WebM, especially removing
> H.264 support from Chrome. So we've held the line, and watched, and waited,
> and personally I am extremely disappointed by the results.
+1. And we have bled and lost support and of the early adopters and
created fostered ill-will in the webdev community because of this issue.
If Google were to announce that they were to drop support of H.264 in
Chrome tomorrow, we'd still have IE and Safari holding out (most people
won't bother to install the required WebM plugins for said browsers). I
don't think Safari ever would about face, and there's only a remote
chance IE would change.
On 13/03/2012 6:31 a.m., Ralph Giles wrote:
> On 12/03/12 09:27 AM, Andreas Gal wrote:
>
>> I have a solution for mobile, and I am focusing on mobile for now. I would like to solve desktop as well, but there I don't have a working solution for the 40% of XP users--yet.
> If we're going to compromise our principles on this issue, we should
> license a proprietary decoder implementation and ship it with our
> official desktop builds.
I agree with Ralph: the best solution for our users is to suck it up and
pay the H.264/AAC/MP3 license fees and ship libav/ffmpeg on desktop, and
ship hardware decoders on mobile. If necessary we can patch security
holes in libav, so we're not vulnerable to the black-box problem we get
with system codecs on desktop, and we can offer H.264 support to the 40%
of our users on XP - something that IE can't do.
On 13/03/2012 7:44 a.m., Andreas Gal wrote:
> Google pledged many things they didn't follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price. H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing.
In my darker moments I've wondered if this was a deliberate strategy by
Chrome to make us continue to hold an untenable position and continue to
bleed users.
Having said that, it would be a shame if YouTube turned on WebM by
default and Chrome dropped H.264 support just as we agreed to pickup
H.264/MP3 support on desktop. We should reach out to Google through
offical channels, and try to get them to publicly commit to the above
before we make a decision.
> We can't license decodes and ship those. That would bar others from shipping Firefox without entering into the same deals.
We owe our success to the users who use our product (Firefox), not to
the downstream users of our code. And we owe our continued success to
retaining said users.
Regards,
Chris P.