Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla Corporation:
What I do know for certain is this: 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.
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. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance. So I am fully in favor of Andreas’s proposal.
Firefox currently relies on Flash fallback to play H.264 videos. While this poses no real disruption on desktops, it’s not a viable mobile option when you couple the popularity of iOS devices and Adobe’s announcement of dropping mobile Flash support.
To remain relevant in a mobile-driven world, Mozilla will now support H.264 media in the HTML5 <video> tag. This is a large - yet necessary - departure from Mozilla’s previous stance on an unencumbered web. To be clear, this only apply’s to their Boot2Gecko mobile operating system and Android version of Firefox.