Firefox has been slowly winning Joe consumers in the past few years by simply doing it better. Faster, less complicated, no spyware, displays everything. Regular users don't give a crap about the ideology behind any of those decisions, they just cared that FF sucks less than IE in almost every measurable way.
From a consumer standpoint, not playing the video format everyone else plays goes against why so many started using FF in the first place.
I don't care if Theora is great, it's not what people are using right now. Maybe Mozilla can fight this battle on the next go-round, but right now they're the odd man out in a split which has all major browsers and many many content creators on the other side.
If Mozilla was Microsoft they could maybe try this, but they're not, and I think many people are frustrated by this video thing because to people who "just want good software," that was the message behind adopting FF from day one. Not militant idealism or everything should be free hippie coder talk or anything else - the impression they gave at least, was of practical and clean decisions to uncomplicated the lives of average users. Sometimes that means going with the flow, even if only for the time being.
The moment they reintroduce "why doesn't this just work" into the equation, they fail at the expectation they spent so much trying to create when Firefox first caught on. This fight is weird because it feels like "Mozilla the ideological open source organization" is battling against "Mozilla the practical and uncomplicated software for your previously complicated and annoying life" marketing campaign.
From a consumer standpoint, not playing the video format everyone else plays goes against why so many started using FF in the first place.
I don't care if Theora is great, it's not what people are using right now. Maybe Mozilla can fight this battle on the next go-round, but right now they're the odd man out in a split which has all major browsers and many many content creators on the other side.
If Mozilla was Microsoft they could maybe try this, but they're not, and I think many people are frustrated by this video thing because to people who "just want good software," that was the message behind adopting FF from day one. Not militant idealism or everything should be free hippie coder talk or anything else - the impression they gave at least, was of practical and clean decisions to uncomplicated the lives of average users. Sometimes that means going with the flow, even if only for the time being.
The moment they reintroduce "why doesn't this just work" into the equation, they fail at the expectation they spent so much trying to create when Firefox first caught on. This fight is weird because it feels like "Mozilla the ideological open source organization" is battling against "Mozilla the practical and uncomplicated software for your previously complicated and annoying life" marketing campaign.