But it's trivially easy to do.
Trivially? I mean...
In fact, there's no license cost at all,
Is the R&D cost for developing this really going to be lower than a license cost for a hardware design that already exists?
with major players like Mozilla on the desktop and mobile browser leader Opera pushing it in the mobile market, there's a real reason to support it.
Nope, you're still missing a major component -- content.
Theora is more than good enough.
Tell that to Google. Again, we are talking about a major investment in real hardware to store larger files to keep the same amount of quality.
you are indeed arguing that private, commercial entities should be able to dictate what we use where.
You'll note in my original post that I said that Google is unlikely to choose an inferior codec. I didn't say what I would prefer that Google do, only what I suspect they will do, regardless of feedback.
You are also conflating one outcome of a suggestion I've made with the purpose of the suggestion. For example:
With closed, proprietary, costly technology like H.264, corporations are basically dictating what devices you are supposed to access online content from.
First, have you ever seen a corporation refused access to H.264? It costs money, but it's not "dictating" devices any more than the use of ARM is letting ARM dictate what devices you can use. Even OpenMoko used ARM.
But you almost seem to be deliberately missing my point. I am not claiming that I would prefer H.264. I am only claiming that it's ludicrous to suggest that the standard should dictate a format, or that a browser should refuse to support a format (even as a plugin), because of temporary legal restrictions.
Imagine where we'd be now if similar steps had been taken with <img> -- if some genius had "standardized" us on PNG, declaring it to be "good enough", and in particular, refusing to support GIF. Aside from the fact that GIF can be animated, and PNG still hasn't settled on a standard for animation (with poor browser and tool support for each of the options), there's also the need for lossy compression, like JPEG.
And on top of all that, there's the usefulness of being able to simply upload an image in whatever format you've got and expect it to display properly.
You seem to be arguing one size fits all, because you desperately don't want to allow even the possibility of a proprietary codec entering the mix. In the short term, I agree with your goal, and I'd rather not have proprietary codecs involved, at least until their patents expire. In the long term, forcing everyone to transcode to a single codec hurts adoption of the standard today, and its long-term viability.
The quality isn't notiecably lower,
Surely, you must be joking.
I mean, here's the very first hit from a Google search for "h.264 vs theora", which also brings up another problem: Dirac. Suppose Dirac gets their act together and becomes a viable alternative. Should Firefox have to be patched?
Wouldn't it be better if Firefox would simply automatically pick up Dirac, as soon as people install the codec for whatever their OS media framework is?
