I don't think you're correct about the gstreamer backend.
Some Mozilla-based projects use Gstreamer (Songbird for one), and I believe they're having discussions about a future collaboration for accessing user's video cameras in the browser but Mozilla don't want to support any old codecs.
Their mission as a non-profit is to support the open web, and promoting royalty-free codecs fits with that mission. They can make a difference by actively choosing not to do stuff, just like at one point in the past they refused to support ActiveX despite having code available. It would have made Firefox a more useful browser at the cost of making the web less open.
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I don't think you're correct about the gstreamer backend.
Some Mozilla-based projects use Gstreamer (Songbird for one), and I believe they're having discussions about a future collaboration for accessing user's video cameras in the browser but Mozilla don't want to support any old codecs.
Their mission as a non-profit is to support the open web, and promoting royalty-free codecs fits with that mission. They can make a difference by actively choosing not to do stuff, just like at one point in the past they refused to support ActiveX despite having code available. It would have made Firefox a more useful browser at the cost of making the web less open.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540 for the progress of the GStreamer <video> backend.
I was confused by this recent comment:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-June/002362.html
"We can't ship gstreamer. We don't ship under the LGPL.
That being said, we can link to it on Linux. We would just need something for the Mac and Windows as well."
Though the mentions of Fennec and the fact that some mobile folk have adopted Gstreamer for DSP accelerated decoding might make it useful there too.
Looks like Fennec on Nokia 810 is the first target:
http://iloapp.mikek.dk/blog/developer?Home&post=44