I find it interesting that he considers Firefox getting H264 support as "the browser getting worse and worse".
I don't like patented codecs either but there's no argument that making Firefox actually work with pretty much any video website out there is making it better, especially as they fought tooth and nail and only caved in when it was a foregone conclusion that H264 won out.
It's easy to see why Mozilla doesn't listen to people like him.
(And the tl;dr doesn't seem to agree with what's actually in the documents either)
> I find it interesting that he considers Firefox getting H264 support as "the browser getting worse and worse".
The issue, at least for me, is that the browser now downloads binary blobs behind my back. Therefore it is no longer an open-source browser, unless I patch it and build my own version to disable this stuff. Firefox being open-source was one of the big selling points originally.
Of course it's very convenient that video just works. User-experience wise it's just better. Noone is arguing that.
> It's easy to see why Mozilla doesn't listen to people like him.
Yes. It's completely understandable, the market for people who don't care about these issues is much larger. The reason many people are annoyed is because the free-software tech crowd used to be the target consumer for mozilla, that's the group that built the brand and the goodwill around it. Now they're turning around and using that goodwill to get new markets, while saying "screw you" to the people who built the brand for them.
All the power to them, it's just sad for us old users watching this ship burn. I'm hoping a new project will spring up that picks up the torch and focuses on being an open-source, privacy-preserving browser.
The issue, at least for me, is that the browser now downloads binary blobs behind my back... Firefox being open-source was one of the big selling points originally.
OpenH264 IS open source. Firefox downloads a pre-built binary (that happens to have a patent license included), just like it'll do if you update, for example, Debian Iceweasel.
The reason many people are annoyed is because the free-software tech crowd used to be the target consumer for mozilla
It still is, but only the people who are willing to be reasonable and listen to arguments. Demanding that a browser in 2015 does not support H264 is not realistic.
I mean, there's people arguing here that the current Sync system is a sell-out because it uses passwords instead of the old randomly generated keys.
If I see that, and the H264 argument, then I think there's two kinds of "open source communities": the ones that try to build usable products and a big circklejerk that is happy to have a solution only for themselves. If you follow the discussions about ANY kind of open source project that tries to help the mainstream, you'll often see the same pattern. (GNOME and systemd are some easy examples)
> OpenH264 IS open source. Firefox downloads a pre-built binary (that happens to have a patent license included), just like it'll do if you update, for example, Debian Iceweasel.
Sure, I can download the source. And I can patch firefox to restrict the auto-downloading and instead use a locally bundled version. But at that point I'm forking firefox to get a full-featured version built from source.
I can see arguments either way, but a lot of people, myself included, would not consider this fully open-source code.
Again, I am in no way claiming that the majority of people have a problem with this. But there is a group of tech people, who have historically been very pro-mozilla, who are now more on the fence or actively dislike moves like this.
> It still is, but only the people who are willing to be reasonable and listen to arguments. Demanding that a browser in 2015 does not support H264 is not realistic.
I would prefer you respond to the arguments made rather than resorting to strawmen. Nowhere in my post did I demand that H264 not be supported. I voiced an objection to the way it was included. You are free to disagree. If H264 really needed to be supported, I would have preferred this be done through exposing the OS video codecs, leaving firefox out of the whole thing.
> I mean, there's people arguing here that the current Sync system is a sell-out because it uses passwords instead of the old randomly generated keys.
And were any of those people me? Please, stop with the strawmen. This has nothing to do with the H264 discussion.
> If I see that, and the H264 argument, then I think there's two kinds of "open source communities": the ones that try to build usable products and a big circklejerk that is happy to have a solution only for themselves. If you follow the discussions about ANY kind of open source project that tries to help the mainstream, you'll often see the same pattern. (GNOME and systemd are some easy examples)
Just like we have different makes of car, most of them targeting the average consumer and some of them targeting niches and people who enjoy driving for its own sake. What's the problem, exactly, with making a product for a niche market? Why can't we have a browser made for techies?
When did scratching ones own itch become a bad thing in the open source community? For the record, I have contributed to browser development in the past, both mozilla and other projects. All of those contributions were to solve issues for me. Others have benefited from that. That's how a large chunk of the open source code we use every day got started.
By your definition of open source, I know of no compiled application that's fully open source. If you want to change it, you're going to need to fork it. If that's not intrinsic to source code in principle, it is in practice.
As to the H264 situation - how is using closed source and patented implementations better than using open-source but patented implementations?
I don't think anybody is happy with H264; but blaming mozilla is counterproductive. They clearly aren't calling the shots on this; and they tried their utmost to prevent it from happening by supporting numerous unencumbered alternatives. However, companies such as Apple and Microsoft refused to participate, and web developers chose to support H264 over the free alternatives. And lets be honest - there's no free alternative with comparable quality. And realizing that, mozilla supports the very interesting https://xiph.org/daala/ - but that's clearly far from ready.
What else could they have done to avoid H264 dominance? Failing to implement it would simply have hastened firefoxes decline, as despite FF's onetime significant market share, sites never adopted H264 alternatives to any large extent.
If you want to blame somebody, blame webdevs for that (but again... it's not like there was a good alternative).
> By your definition of open source, I know of no compiled application that's fully open source. If you want to change it, you're going to need to fork it. If that's not intrinsic to source code in principle, it is in practice.
By far most open source software, when built without changes, will produce a fully working binary that does not grab and run binary blobs at runtime. All that software would meet my criteria for acceptance.
> As to the H264 situation - how is using closed source and patented implementations better than using open-source but patented implementations?
If the work is deferred to the OS, it's not mozilla's problem. It is then up to the user to choose a platform with the desired codecs, which may be open or closed. People on platforms that already contain and expose closed-source codecs are unlikely to be concerned about these issues.
The rest of your comment, I agree with. I know mozilla fought hard to get a free codec included in the standard. That was very good, I'm certainly not trying to demonise mozilla here.
My problem here is only with the technical solution implemented after that fight was lost. And I worry about the precedent being set that mozilla is okay with the browser downloading and running precompiled binaries from the internet at runtime, without an explicit request from the user with a big, scary warning. That's mozilla's prerogative, they decide to go with the larger market and I totally understand that. It doesn't make it any less sad to watch, though.
>By far most open source software, when built without changes, will produce a fully working binary that does not grab and run binary blobs at runtime. All that software would meet my criteria for acceptance.
Huh? We're not talking about whether the main part of firefox is open source. We're talking about whether the H264 plugin is open source.
Look at firefox as your apt-get and the H264 plugin as something that you can either download a compiled binary of or compile yourself.
Is the only objection that it does it at 'runtime'? If you consider first boot part of the install process then that problem solves itself.
I don't like patented codecs either but there's no argument that making Firefox actually work with pretty much any video website out there is making it better, especially as they fought tooth and nail and only caved in when it was a foregone conclusion that H264 won out.
It's easy to see why Mozilla doesn't listen to people like him.
(And the tl;dr doesn't seem to agree with what's actually in the documents either)