They really don't and they really should. Building a plugin architecture where users could decide based on their local laws which technology to use when some may be patent encumbered would be a big win for open source, standards, and freedom on the Internet.
The Mozilla people already stated there is no technical reason they are not supporting H.264. It is idealogical. They are well aware that they could make it pluggable or use the system codecs, they just don't want to.
It seems like we went through this in the 90s with wmv/quicktime/etc. I can't recall why it failed & I'm not sure why it should be better this time around.
I see a lot of VP6 and Sorenson listed there. What we really have today is Flash/Flash/Flash. I'm curious about how much VC-1 use there is in the wild in the large Microsoft/Silverlight streaming video installations.
They really don't and they really should. Building a plugin architecture where users could decide based on their local laws which technology to use when some may be patent encumbered would be a big win for open source, standards, and freedom on the Internet.