I must confess I’m not in the video/audio business, and I don’t know 100% about the differences between Theora and H.264 and its licensing model.
But I do know about GIF and MP3, so it’s easy to choose a side in this topic: go for open source supported and royalty-free technology for the win!
There’s another point. My three years old laptop can hardly play a video in some of the flash players out there, and certainly it’s not able to play most of the HD videos. Flash on Fedora (eh, Linux) sucks and melts my CPU even with small ads.
With HTML5 and in-browser Theora support it’s different. The video in this post plays smooth and using about 30% of my CPU. Yes, it’s the way to go (or you can donate some bucks so I can buy a new laptop, dammit!).
I don’t get the point to buy a Quad Core laptop just to watch some videos on the Internet, do you?
"Maybe someday the Linux version of Firefox won’t be treated as a second class citizen, especially considering it’s by far the most popular browser on the platform."
—
From Firefox 3.5 RC2 Linux vs Windows Performance by Andrew M. Lawrence.
This is not the first time I read a rant about Mozilla Foundation support policy for Firefox: windows version goes first (ie. Firefox 3 will release with system-killing performance problem).
"A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser."
—
From Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension.
As the Washington Post article says, this may introduce vulnerabilities into Firefox. Great for a security update that installs unwanted software without user permission, isn’t it?
I wonder why people keeps on relying on closed source, but with those update policies, I believe it’s a total nonsense.
