To me, demanding they pay up millions of dollars per year just to throw away the very ideals that made the web what it is today feels a lot like breaking the arms of the paramedic who saved your life only moments ago. Firefox is the single-biggest thing to have happened to the web, and now that the Apples and Microsofts of this world have reaped the benefits of Mozilla’s hard work, we should just kick them to the curb? However, die-hard or no, it is undeniable that without the vigour of the open source community, the development of the web would have been a lot slower.
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The people who rallied against coding for Firefox sound suspiciously like the people currently promoting H.264: why code for anything else than H.264 when it is the de-facto standard? Why think of the open source world (which is the very motor of much of the web as you see it today) from which we profited so much?Īs anyone reading OSNews regularly can attest, I’m no die-hard open source fanatic. Web standards were important, and IE ignored those to a great degree, while Firefox adhered to them – this way, IE hindered the development of a standards-based web. Many people who claimed to be of a practical nature, stated that supporting Firefox was nonsensical, since Internet Explorer was the de-facto standard, and by coding your website to at least work on IE, you’d be covering the web more than enough. When Firefox was gaining popularity, it also faced an uphill battle against Internet Explorer’s popularity. My biggest gripe – one that actually slightly infuriates me – is that of the parallel between Internet Explorer 6 and H.264. There are still a few things I’d like to add, most importantly the apparent hypocrisy displayed by many of the more vocal H.264 proponents. If this is indeed somewhat reflective of Microsoft’s stance in this matter, than the company is even more out of touch with the web than we already knew. He likens Google’s move to the president of the United States banning English in favour of Esperanto, which, of course, makes about as much sense as gobble hikky hikky daf gorot. Then there’s this Tim Sneath, the head of ‘Windows and web evangelism for Microsoft’, whatever that means. Luckily, thanks to Haavard, I don’t have to.
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In my opinion – and judging by the comments at Ars, I wasn’t alone – it was a very poorly written article, full of disingenuous remarks and blatant twisting of facts. We already featured Peter Bright’s article in the news elsewhere column to the right, and I originally planned to write a thorough response to it.
Also within, a rant (there’s no other word for it) about the disrespect displayed by H.264 proponents towards the very open source community that saved and invigorated the web. Opera’s Haavard – speaking on his own behalf – slammed the article which appeared on Ars Technica earlier today, while Micrsoft’s Tim Sneath likened Google’s move to the president of the United States banning English in favour of Esperanto. And the fallout from Google’s decision to drop H.264 support from its Chrome web browser continues to fall.