Most of you have no doubt already seen that Mozilla will be changing their position on H.264 support for HTML5 video in future releases. This is an extremely important decision that I’ve been hoping to see for a while now, and I am really glad this is being done.

There is no doubt that we need patent-unencumbered standards for web codecs (or as much as is possible given the dismal patent ecology today), and while much giddy anticipation followed Google/On2’s release of VP8 into the open, I don’t believe it ever made sense to expect the codec landscape to change drastically in the short timespan everyone expected. There’s a lot of the hardware and software out there that needs to change (see any SoCs with VP8 support yet?), not to mention the interests of the MPEG-LA mafconsortium.

I love Firefox, both as a product and what it means for an open web (for those of you that know me, this might be hard to believe given all my ranting, but it’s true!). I’m glad Mozilla chose to live to fight another day rather than go out in a blaze of glory and (or a flicker of irrelevance).

p.s.: these are my views and do not necessarily represent those of my employer

p.p.s.: Alessandro’s been doing some great work to get the GStreamer multimedia backend going again (this makes so much more sense than going the NIH route!)