Firefox isn’t supporting the H.264 video standard because it’s patented and the patent owners want fees: it’s not free. But if Google and YouTube make it ubiquitous, will users have a real choice? Should they care?
YouTube has recently announced an experimental HTML5 player that uses the H.264 codec for video instead of a format based on Adobe Flash. You might think that would be applauded as a move towards open standards, but as I noted briefly last week, the new system works with Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers, but not Mozilla’s Firefox. It doesn’t support H.264.
This is a critical issue for Mozilla, because it risks losing market share. If users find they can play YouTube videos using Chrome or Safari but they won’t play in Firefox, some users are going to switch browsers.
Mozilla’s problem is that H.264 is encumbered by patents: it’s not a royalty-free format. And according to Robert O’Callahan in a Saturday blog post on Video, Freedom And Mozilla (with the rider that it’s “nothing but my own opinion as a developer of video-related Mozilla code!”), licensing the patents “would violate principles of free software that we strongly believe in.” He says:
“Users just want video to work. You Mozilla people are such idealists! Yes, that is the reason for Mozilla to exist. Anyway, in the short term, our users probably won’t be affected much since Flash fallback will still work. In the long term, I think freedom will ultimately benefit users (not just Firefox users, but all users).”
The same day, Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, explained why Mozilla doesn’t license the H.264 codec, and his post included the following:
“Mozilla has decided differently, in part because there is no apparent means for us to license H.264 under terms that would cover other users of our technology, such as Linux distributors, or people in affiliated projects like Wikimedia or the Participatory Culture Foundation. Even if we were to pay the $5,000,000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off.”
As Shaver points out, that kind of fee would have made the success of the web impossible. Mozilla would never have got going if it had had to pay $5m or so to use HTML, CSS, JavaScript and similar technologies.
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