Don't worry, Mozilla is taking a principled stand that will become the impetus for their final jump into irrelevance. If IE9 does what their recent noises regarding HTML5 have been suggesting then Mozilla will join Opera in the "cute but useless" category and Chrome & IE9 will divvy up the Firefox marketshare within three years.
Sorry, my sarcasm meter needs some calibration. While HTML5 video driving forward web standards is certainly nice, I can't even bring myself to believe that we will rid ourselves of the rotting carcass that is IE6 within the next three years, let alone Flash as a video delivery platform. I don't think Mozilla feels threatened yet, but we'll see if they change their minds once they see this affecting their bottom line.
Strangely enough, my gripes with Firefox have driven me to Opera, despite the "cute but useless" label you have slapped on it in such a cavalier fashion.
Opera is sort of "cute but useless" -- on some sites I maintain for non-technical users, Opera has a smaller market share than IE5. IE6 will probably be around until we're all dead of age.
I'm guessing you are in the US since their denizens are famous for assuming the world stops outside their borders.
Opera + Chrome + Mozilla (i.e. Theora supporting) market share varies by region but is probably over 50% in every european country bar the UK and that will probably topple with the browser ballot.
Opera + Chrome + Mozilla (i.e. Theora supporting) market share varies by region but is probably over 50% in every european country bar the UK
Why do Opera users always say something like this? "Opera (and the important browsers) has some huge market share!" 0.2 + 18 + 43 > 50, but the 0.2 really doesn't matter.
I phrased it like that because the individual share varies by country and the article is about HTML5 video and Theora which is a cross browser issue. I have never heard anyone use that kind of phrase before, even though I think they should for any discussion of browser standards support. Especially now the IE-Firefox duo are being challenged in the US by Safari and worldwide by Chrome, and doubly-especially in Europe.
This is important in the case of say Russia in which the top four browsers are Opera with 32.8%, Firefox with 30.8%, IE with 28.43% and Chrome with 5.71% (data from http://gs.statcounter.com/)
Just looking at the Firefox stats here and ignoring Opera would be highly misleading regarding viability of Theora in this market which is near 70% (assuming up-to-date browsers).
Silverlight runs on top of IE6. Silverlight 3 has support for "plugable media codecs", which means that you can stream Theora/OGG content in Silverlight (I don't know if it can be hardware accelerated ... but it would work for non-HD content anyway).
Silverlight also has good browser/JS interoperability, which means it is possible to add support for HTML5 Theora in any IExplorer version without even asking the user if it wants to or not.
I couldn't find better references, but see here ...
Penetration is already pretty good, and I'm pretty sure that within the next 2 years all IExplorer users will have Silverlight installed (Microsoft can always push it using their update mechanism).
You could do the same in Firefox ... add support for H.264 by using a Flash or a Silverlight applet in combination with a JS script that manipulates the HTML5 tags and communicates with the applet.
Since Silverlight is also running in Safari, you can add Theora support to it too (wouldn't work for iPhones, but still, it's pretty cool).
And it's all transparent. No confirmation dialogs.
It all depends on penetration rate of Silverlight of course, but recent stats (from riastats.com or statowl.com) puts it at ~ 45% ... jumping 10% from September (probably because of events like the Vancouver Olympics requiring it).
So web developers that are looking for a solution to streaming media that's standards compliant, can just do something like this.
Pretty ironic that the technical solution for this new format war comes from Microsoft.
You can't really stream Vorbis in Silverlight 3. Yes, you can plug in codecs, but there aren't any usable codec plugins available. There's one made by Mono that is way too buggy to be used in production and another one that's not even released yet, just promised in a blog post so might be just as well vaporware.
I'm not sure if there's anything for Theora at all and I don't think there ever will be, considering that Silverlight can legally play back H264 out of the box anyway and anyone who does stuff in Silverlight (and generally Microsoft stack) is probably a pragmatist and not an ideologist who worries about the "freeness" of codecs.
It's not there yet, but it is technically possible.
Of course the current implementation sucks, because it's an abandoned port of some Java code. But if someone cares enough about this, it can be implemented.
And you wouldn't need to be someone that does stuff in Silverlight ... all is needed is some Javascript/applet stored on some CDN that you can just drop in your HTML.
As far as ideologists go (thinking about services like Wikimedia here) ... what's better?
Using a proprietary plugin for those proprietary platforms that don't have Theora or using a patented format?
Life is full of compromises, you can't have it all.
