This is what I was wondering. If this is true that what we're talking about is linking against proprietary libraries that already exist on the user's machine, then I don't understand the argument against it. By the article's logic they should pull the plug on firefox for windows & mac since they are more "non-free" than h.264.
So using Flash/WMP/QT -plugin to playback video via <object>/<embed> -tags is OK but using native APIs to play <video> -tags is insecure and buggy. Riiight.
"Mozilla wants to encourage Web authors to use Theora"
That seems to be working so well. Really they're just encouraging users to not use Firefox. The user chose to have those codecs on their system - either by installing and OS that comes with it, or installing the codec itself.
Let the user chose what codecs they want to support.
Firefox won't use system codecs because they might be insecure, they might be buggy
This does not address the original objection. Calls to the Mac and Windows are not known to be any less buggy or insecure than calls to the h264 APIs. So why accept one and not the other? The only sane answer of course is that you can't build an app at all without calling the OS basic APIs of your host machine, but you can try to have an ugly work around h264.
Comments
This is what I was wondering. If this is true that what we're talking about is linking against proprietary libraries that already exist on the user's machine, then I don't understand the argument against it. By the article's logic they should pull the plug on firefox for windows & mac since they are more "non-free" than h.264.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directsh...
Firefox won't use system codecs because they might be insecure, they might be buggy, and Mozilla wants to encourage Web authors to use Theora.
So using Flash/WMP/QT -plugin to playback video via <object>/<embed> -tags is OK but using native APIs to play <video> -tags is insecure and buggy. Riiight.
"Mozilla wants to encourage Web authors to use Theora"
That seems to be working so well. Really they're just encouraging users to not use Firefox. The user chose to have those codecs on their system - either by installing and OS that comes with it, or installing the codec itself.
Let the user chose what codecs they want to support.
Firefox won't use system codecs because they might be insecure, they might be buggy
This does not address the original objection. Calls to the Mac and Windows are not known to be any less buggy or insecure than calls to the h264 APIs. So why accept one and not the other? The only sane answer of course is that you can't build an app at all without calling the OS basic APIs of your host machine, but you can try to have an ugly work around h264.