[conspire] Browser 'Wars'

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Micah Lee (twopointfour at riseup.net):

> Sorry, the <video> tag is a good example of big improvements coming to
> modern web browsers that help rid us of proprietary crap like Flash. And
> I consider streaming video to be "flashy".

The <video> tag is an obvious good idea as a general proposition.  It's
too bad that video as a general area is so hobbled by patent problems
that it's almost hopeless in the medium term until a few dozen remaining
codec-related patents expire.

And, yes, I'm referring in particular, albeit not exclusively, to 
H.264 / MPEG-4 Part 10 / AVC.  Which far too many people who know better
actually are talking about when they use the term 'HTML5 video'.

A bunch of people are trying to sweet-talk the public into ignoring the 
MPEG Licensing Association's obvious intention to be a patent troll over
the next decade.  Me, I'm not stupid, and haven't been paid off, so I 
tend to tell the truth:  Implementations of the <video> tag will have
fatal patent problems (either killer problems in the case of H.264
or risk in the case of for a while, or serious risk of submarine patents
in the case of Theora).  VP8 / Matroska could be the sole exception,
except so far it's losing the adoption battle, and the corporate
flunkies and their puppet IT press are pushing H.264, which is
apparently what we're going to be told to eat for the next decade.

So, valiant try, W3 Consortium, and the fatal problems aren't your
fault.  I'll be interested when the patents run out.


> Have you looked through source code in github lately?

Never with JavaScript enabled.  I'll have a look, thanks.

> I thought you could run Chromium on Windows?

Probably.  I don't have much to do with MS-Windows, so I don't follow
that.

> I didn't include Chromium because my understanding is that Chrome is
> just Chromium with a proprietary wrapper (I could be wrong, I've never
> used Chromium).

No.  Chrome is a variant form of Chromium with several proprietary
additions and undisclosed _other_ modifications to serve Google, Inc.'s 
purposes.  Google, Inc.'s purposes and mine are not necessarily the same
(witness, e.g., their purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 BN), so I would
be moderately insane to run their proprietary, unauditable, unexaminable
binary-only code as my Web browser.

But, hey, you're a Windows user and are sui-generis OK with your
computer working for someone else with an agenda hostile to your own.
;->


> And I didn't include Konqueror because it's not very popular and it
> has the huge disadvantage of being embedded into KDE the same way IE
> is embedded into Windows, making it not cross-platform.

Well, no, that's actually not the case.  Konqueror's dependencies
include Qt, kdelibs, and of course xlib, so it should run anywhere those
exist.  E.g., I have it on Debian and don't have KDE.  Doubtless it
could run, for example, on Macintosh OS X, where all those things run
perfectly fine.

But anyway, I just don't care about MS-Windows.