Comment Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score 1) 663
Firefox could simply use external H.264 decoding capabilities, present in both Windows 7 and OS X by default, and trivially available for Linux.
Frankly, this whole argument is a straw man. Would you really want the codec implemented in the browser anyway? What are the odds the browser developer would implement things as well as the OS developer, especially with respect to features like hardware acceleration? The vast majority of applications, including browsers, have no reason to contain their own implementations of video codecs.
And as far as Firefox in particular, the Mozilla Foundation makes nearly $100M/year in revenue from search engine referral payments. They could trivially afford H.264 decoder licensing, if for some reason they did want to include a decoder internally.
The Mozilla Foundation's decision not to support H.264 is political, not practical.