Mozilla: Firefox Needs H.264 Support To Survive Shift To Mobile

Ryan Paul, at Ars Technica:

One year later, Google still hasn't followed through with that commitment. Mozilla says that it can no longer afford to wait for Google to do what it has promised. In his blog post, Eich explained that H.264 has become too deeply entrenched in the mobile space to be easily displaced and that browsers that don't support it are jeopardizing their own future relevance. "H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile," he wrote. "Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won't sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives." Someone over at Mozilla finally wised up. ∗

The iPad Reviews Are Out

The embargo from Apple to the writers who had been given review units was lifted last night. At 9:00 pm last night, my Twitter feed was flooded by authors posting their reviews. I spent most of my evening reading a great many of them. I wanted to share the few that I thought were best. * John Gruber: iPad (3) * Jim Dalrymple: Review: iPad third generation * Jason Snell: Review: The third-generation iPad * MG Siegler: The New iPad Makes Apple’s Tablet Domination Clearer Than Ever * Joshua Topolsky: iPad review (2012) The consensus: The retina display is a sight to see.

Idealism vs. Pragmatism: Mozilla Debates Supporting H.264 Video Playback

Ryan Paul, at Ars Technica:

Google’s major investment in advancing its unencumbered VP8 codec gave open Web advocates hope that H.264 could still be displaced, but it hasn’t happened. The lack of follow-through from Google on its promise to remove H.264 from Chrome has eroded faith in the search giant’s ability to popularize VP8. Gal says that it’s no longer feasible to wait for the open codec to gain additional traction. “Google pledged many things they didn’t follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price,” he wrote. “H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing.” John Gruber commented on this article in a post today: “Idealism vs. Pragmatism” is exactly what’s going on here. Because as time goes on, the practical arguments in favor of supporting WebM exclusively over H.264 are looking worse and worse. No one is serving WebM. Everyone is serving H.264. And while Mozilla is both talking the talk and walking the walk with regard to their ideals regarding open video, their supposed partner Google is merely talking the talk, shipping a wildly popular browser (Chrome) and mobile platform (Android) that fully support H.264.

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work

Andy Baio, writing for Wired:

Yahoo's lawsuit against Facebook is an insult to the talented engineers who filed patents with the understanding they wouldn't be used for evil. Betraying that trust won't be forgotten, but I doubt it matters anymore. Nobody I know wants to work for a company like that. I'm embarrassed by the patents I filed, but I've learned from my mistake. I'll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same. For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company's incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by attacking younger, smarter companies. Yahoo tried and failed, over and over again, to build a social network that people would love and use. Unable to innovate, Yahoo is falling back to the last resort of a desperate, dying company: litigation as a business model. Yahoo is now a patent troll. This fact makes my worry about the future of Flickr grow greater still.

The New iPad's Greatest Feature: The Battery

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blog:

While Apple has undoubted put more power efficient technology into its next-generation iPad — for example, dropping the processor architecture down from 40nm to 28 nm would have resulted in quite a significant power saving — the more dramatic improvement has been the battery itself. Between the release of the iPad 2 last year and the announcement of the new iPad yesterday, Apple has nearly doubled the capacity of the battery, taking it from 25Wh to a massive 42Wh. Measured in milliamps this boosts the battery from 6944 mAh to a monstrous 11,666 mAh. Kingsley-Hughes covers much more in this article that I would like to quote here, but when I was trying to decide exactly what to quote, I found that I wanted to quote entirely too much. Just go read his entire article. Done? Good. I've only seen a couple of sites write anything about this and yet, this is one of the major accomplishments that Apple has made with the 3rd generation iPad. Had Apple not been able to make these battery advances, the new Retina display, 4G networking, faster processor…all together would have greatly reduced battery performance. The tech press would have been howling that the new iPad was doomed to failure. And yet, Apple has miraculously increased the battery by so much, without adding a significant amount of weight or altering the case design, that most seemed to not even notice this great improvement. Most wrote it off as am insignificant accomplishment on Apple's part. A shame, I think.

Why The iPad Has And Will Continue To Dominate The Tablet Market

Matthew Panzarino, writing for The Next Web:

In a Neilsen survey from earlier this year it was shown that almost no respondents stopped using their smartphones after purchasing a tablet, while 3% completely stopped using their desktop computers and 32% reported that they were using their desktops much less. Consumers treat phones and tablets as separate entities, they look at them as different tools for different purposes. He goes on to discuss many other points, in a well written piece that does a very good job of laying it all out.

The Information Diet: You Are What You Read

J. A. Ginsburg, writing on TrackerNews:

It is not a pretty picture. And, yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the insidious practice of using keywords to game search results, is driving this race to the inane. The only metric that counts is popularity. “The problem is no one is searching for the Pentagon Papers,” notes Johnson, “No one is searching for high quality investigative reporting.” The next time someone asks me why I dislike SEO, I'm going to direct them to this piece.

We Need To Talk About Android

Frasier Speirs, an expert on technology used in education, chimed in on a question he gets asked a lot: "What's wrong with Android?":

You're either buying into a platform or you're buying gadgets. The fundamental disconnect between the apparently solid Android engineering that's happening at Google and the actual packaging and deployment that's happening to end-users is turning into a real problem. To my mind, it's a dealbreaker for schools or anyone thinking beyond their next carrier subsidy. I would argue that most, if not all of the points that he lays out in his article, also apply to Enterprise as well.