Why on earth should Firefox ship a different HTML5 engine for Linux than for the other OSes? To me, it doesn't make a lot sense to assume Firefox provides a better HTML5 implementation for all other operating systems.
With all due respect, this comment seems to be more of an overall anti-Linux sentiment.
Actually, Firefox uses the platform decoders to decode patented codecs like H264 or AAC. So the operating system does play a role. I also think it's not unreasonable to believe that hardware accelerated H264 decoding works less well on Linux.
Good catch. So replacing "HTLM5" with "video codes", this may have a point.
But I'm still wondering, as we have very good decoders from projects like FFmpeg and VLC. (Not sure which of all those decoders are used by Firefox.) These are platform independent and to my experience better than the platform specific libraries.
For example, I often hear that people install VLC under Windows because it decodes lots of video formats better than the natively available Windows Media Player. So the native Windows libraries probably aren't that good.
Also, at least the FFmpeg project explicitly states that they don't care about patent FUD, so we can safely assume they don't cripple their decoders in the fear of violating patents: https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html
Firefox can actually use ffmpeg as a decoder. It would be a great option for supporting a lot of these formats. However, Mozilla can't ship it enabled, because the patent problem is very real. See, for example, all of the Play Store apps that got C&D letters from Dolby for using ffmpeg's implementation of AC3.
Firefox does ship a lot of other video and audio codecs though, such as vorbis, opus, theora, vp8, and vp9. It's recommended to use these for HTML5 when possible because they can be easily supported everywhere.
Just a minor nitpick: Under Linux, people don't download from Mozilla but have it installed by default. If not, they install via package manager and not via download from Mozilla.
So it's not Mozilla making that decision, but the respective Linux distros. But of course they have the same problem.
I believe a good compromise would be to check if ffmpeg is installed on the system, and use it only when available. So the user would have to install ffmpeg directly.
That would be a very different situation from including code from ffmpeg directly into some app.
I still use Debian on eeepc 1000H, which is over six years old, I suppose. I love everything about it, except that it is too underpowered now to even watch youtube in 720p. It's mic and camera gave in, some buttons are missing, it can not handle much anymore. I thought about getting old 13" MBP and installing Debian, but systemd is too bothersome. I'm not sure about hard and soft anymore..
