thoughts on mozilla

Chris Pearce, an engineer working out of Mozilla’s Auckland office, reports that WebM has been enabled for Firefox nightlies. Starting today, anyone running the general mozilla-central builds will get WebM for free.

After you download the nightly, you probably want to try it out. Pearce reports:

If you’re looking for some WebM videos to test with, you can view WebM videos on YouTube’s HTML5 Experiement [sic] with nightly builds from tonight onwards.

Download a nightly build now. (And ignore the broken dates on the nightly site.)

Slowly but surely, Google is adding WebM support to Chrome, TechCrunch reports. While it’s not yet available in release versions, WebM support has made its way into Chrome development builds. Soon they’ll be available in beta builds and eventually release builds, likely with Chrome 6.0.

WebM support will ship in Firefox 4 final as well, assuming patents don’t kill it.

Stephen Shankland – who has an awesome name, countered only by Todd Jealous – has a piece on CNET News today about the patent concerns around Google’s recently open sourced WebM codec, which has a horrible name. It’s a good read, and I recommend anyone interested in open video check it out.

The gist of the piece is that the MPEG LA considers WebM as infringing on one or more of the patents in its vast H.264 portfolio. MPEG LA is even considering creating a patent pool for WebM, allowing companies to license the patents and remain free and clear from lawsuits.

All of this goes against Google, Mozilla, and Opera’s message that WebM is indeed a royalty free, unencumbered-by-patents, open video codec that anyone can use. While WebM is based on VP8, it’s not clear whether On2 actually owned all of the patents used in the specification.

If WebM isn’t free and clear of H.264 patents, Mozilla could end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit and the web wouldn’t have the open video it desperately needs.

Of course, this entire discussion is moot for one big reason: Apple. Without Apple supporting WebM in their devices or in Safari, websites will continue to create at least two versions of their video. Since H.264 can be put inside a Flash wrapper, I don’t see that boding well for Mozilla or the open web.