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Mozilla on H.264: Mobile matters most

[ Thanks to Amy
Bennett
for this link. ]

“First, there’s the whole problem with Flash, which Apple
effectively killed on mobile by not supporting it for the wildly
popular iOS devices. Firefox officially supports the WebM codec,
because it, unlike H.264, doesn’t have a patent sword of Damocles
hanging over it. But, when a user comes across H.264 video content,
it can still be played, because Web developers usually add some
code in their pages to let Flash handle the H.264 playback.

“‘Firefox supports only unencumbered formats from Gecko?s
implementation. We rely on Flash fallback that authors invariably
write, as shown above. Let that sink in: we, Mozilla, rely on Flash
to implement H.264 for Firefox users.’

“And that is the crux of the problem, because last November,
Adobe announced it will not be developing Flash for mobile devices
anymore. (Or desktop Linux, for that matter–I’ll come back to
that.)”


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