Firefox Enables WebRTC, H.264 And MP3 Support

Mozilla, which bowed to the market power of the H.264 video compression technology last year, now has built support for the patent-encumbered standard into the Nightly version of Firefox on Windows 7. Mozilla can't actually ship H.264 in its open-source product because of the patent licensing requirements, so it decided instead to adapt Firefox to draw on H.264 support built into newer operating systems.

Mozilla had thrown its weight behind VP8, a royalty-free codec from Google, but it hasn't caught on nearly as widely as H.264, and Google scrapped a promise to drop H.264 from Chrome. Two years ago, Google said it would drop the support "in the next couple of months." Part of H.264's clout stems from power-efficient decoding enabled by chips in just about every smartphone on the market today. On personal computers, Adobe Systems' Flash Player often handles video decoding, but it's barred from iOS.