14 DAY TRIAL // With the open source nature of Mozilla Firefox, it was bound to happen sooner or later, a developer has started work on a fork of the popular web browser, which will include support for the H.264 codec. Dubbed Wild Fox, the project is in the very early stages and is aimed at the many countries where software patents are not recognized.
“The Firefox project has opted to exclude certain features due to software patents, patents which are only valid in a small number of countries, including the USA and South-Korea,” the project’s homepage reads.
“This means that decisions have been made due to patents which do not apply in most parts of the world. The Wild Fox project aims to rectify this by releasing builds with these features included, builds which will of course only be available to those not in software patent-encumbered countries,” it adds.
At the moment, it’s nothing more than an idea. Its initiator, Maya Posch, is currently looking for developers to help make Wild Fox a reality. The plan is to use one of the open-source libraries that support the H.264 codec like Libavcodec or the GStreamer framework, which would enable Firefox to employ any of the codecs the users have installed on their machines. Wild Fox will stay as close to the stable Firefox branch as possible and may eventually add other features that Mozilla won’t.
The fork is necessary to bring H.264 support in Firefox. Mozilla has refused to license the codec, arguing that it goes against the foundation's free software principles. Because the codec is patented, bundling it with Firefox would prevent anyone else from compiling their own builds without first acquiring the license. For a piece of software as popular as Firefox, that comes in at $5 million. Wild Fox may solve the problem for countries that don’t have software patents, but it is going to be illegal to download it in the US and plenty of other places.
Mozilla is holding fast its position in the HTML5 video debate, breaking it up into two sides. On the one hand, you have Mozilla and Opera, which only support the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, on the other, you have Microsoft and Apple, which only support H.264. Both of the last companies are part of the MPEG LA, H.264’s licensing body. The outlier is Google, which supports both codecs in Google Chrome. The company is widely expected to open-source the modern VP8 video codec later this week at the Google I/O developer conference, possibly solving the whole issue, or just adding more coal to the fire.