Mozilla Firefox 23.0 Now In Beta With New Features

[RahulSundaram]

What happens to distros which refuse to support proprietary codes and rely on Firefox as default browser?

so options they might have:

• abolish their "no proprietary codecs" policy
• make a exception of the policy or ignore that Firefox 23+ has h264 support
• remove Firefox from their repository
• include only a modified version of Firefox 23+ in their repo, which doesn't support h264

You seem to misunderstand. Firefox is NOT including H.264 by default. They are just using Gstreamer which has a plugin to support H.264 and distributions can choose to include that plugin ... or not. The only advantage is that if you do have that plugin installed, Firefox will play videos in that codec.

[Fenrin]

[...]

ah yes I did

Thank you for the clarification.

[bwat47]

What happens to distros which refuse to support proprietary codes and rely on Firefox as default browser?

so options they might have:

• abolish their "no proprietary codecs" policy
• make a exception of the policy or ignore that Firefox 23+ has h264 support
• remove Firefox from their repository
• include only a modified version of Firefox 23+ in their repo, which doesn't support h264

Distros would absolutely not have to include a modified firefox. This change simply compiles firefox with gstreamer support, *Not* "h.264" support. All firefox is doing is generically supporting gstreamer, so that any content gstreamer has plugins installed to play, firefox can play. Nothing changes for distros, most distros don't ship with an h.264 plugin already. There is nothing proprietary about gstreamer itself.

For the end user they simply need to install the right gstreamer plugin to be able to play h.264 in firefox, and these plugins are easily available in most distros repos (and in some distros by default. Interestingly enough debian wheezy actually has the gstreamer ffmpeg plugin by default now so has h.264 support out of the box)

[peppepz]

Totally disabling javascript is rather stupid and will break most sites.

No, it's not stupid, to the point that there's a very popular extension that does just that and you're even suggesting me to install it. Anyway, I think I've whined enough about that, after all as long as Mozilla don't disable about:config in Firefox (which for coherence they should do, as it contains lots of "destructive" options), it's not a big deal to go and disable JavaScript in there the few times it's needed.

I haven't tried if kmscon supports it, I'm not doing it just now because I'm afraid that it could crash my X session

Ok now I've tried, kmscon doesn't support the blink attribute. :'-(