This week, YouTube announced its HTML5 beta, based on an earlier demo at Google I/O 2009. Vimeo swiftly followed suit.

Compared to their Flash-based predecessors, these new video players have various downsides: no full-screen mode, no embedding on third-party sites and, at least for YouTube’s, no play/pause using the space bar. Other than that, this is great: it’s great because we no longer rely on a proprietary mechanism of Adobe’s that was originally designed to display animated vector graphics, not provide a UI and codec to play movies; it’s great because a standards committee (and an experiment-friendly sidekick) have created this technology, and will hopefully drive it forward; it’s great because, in fact, this has benefits in performance (far lower CPU usage; higher likelihood of GPU acceleration), accessibility and other areas.

And it works, right now, everywhere, without limitations.

Ah, who am I kidding.

It in fact works in the newest versions of Safari and Chrome (including Google Chrome Frame for IE), and, if you’re on Linux, Opera. It doesn’t in IE, and — here’s the sad, perhaps surprising part — not in Firefox either.

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You may be misled into thinking that the HTML working group standardizing a <video> tag implies them also agreeing on the formats used by such videos, mandating one or more video and audio codecs and container formats to support. In fact, you’d be right that the original proposal looked exactly like that, requiring Ogg Media as the container, Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio.

The big benefit of Xiph.org’s Ogg-branded series of codecs is their liberal approach — no patents, open specification, no cost, BSD or BSD-style licensing. In other words: pretty much anyone gets to use them if they want. Contrast that to the increasingly common H.264 video codec, which costs money to license and has patents. You’d think the choice is pretty clear: for the consumer and the developer, Ogg Anything means bliss and sanity.

It’s not quite as clear-cut. Apple and Nokia objected to HTML5 requiring browsers to implement Ogg Theora, citing difficulty of hardware acceleration (plenty of chips that specialize in H.264 decoding already exist). Apple added that, even though it is claimed Ogg Theora doesn’t have any patents, there’s no guarantee. Google doesn’t want to switch YouTube to Theora, in part because Flash already supports H.264 (so that’s what much of YouTube’s existing library uses), and because the latter achieves better quality at the same bitrate.

As such, the requirement was dropped from a later draft version of HTML5. Safari 4 ended up shipping supporting whatever codecs your installed QuickTime comes with (which includes H.264, but doesn’t include Ogg Theora unless you install it yourself
), Firefox and Opera with only Ogg Theora, and Google Chrome with both. I said Opera only supports Ogg Theory; as I understand it, Opera on Linux is a special case: it behaves similarly to Safari in that it supports whatever GStreamer happens to have (including, where available, H.264), whereas on other platforms, they instead bundle Ogg Theora.

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So here we are: a <video> tag and plenty of confusion as to what it means to the end user. Will my browser play this? Will it not?

Controversial quality comparisons aside, one cannot deny H.264 is very widespread. Apple has been pushing it big time, Blu-Ray mandates it (and the late HD-DVD allowed it), and Adobe Flash has supported it since version 9. For pretty much anything “HD”, it has become the preferred format; the Windows Media-derived VC-1 never quite took off the same way, and Windows 7 even finally ships with it. If smartphones, portable video players, etc. do video, chances are they do H.264. The same simply cannot be said for Ogg Theora.

But perhaps ubiquity isn’t the point?

If you ask Robert O’Callahan, it’s not. Licensing a patent-encumbered, non-free codec is a difficult matter, but that’s not even the big problem. The alternative of having the operating system’s media framework provide the codecs (as is the case with Safari/QuickTime and Opera/GStreamer) doesn’t appeal to him for a number of reasons, including a support nightmare and code maintenance headaches, but most of all this:

Even if a volunteer produces a patch [to make Firefox use Windows's extensible media framework DirectShow for video codec support], I would not want to ship it in Firefox in the near future; let me try to explain why.

Probably most important: we want to focus our energy on promoting open unencumbered codecs at this time.

That was half a year ago. He has reiterated it since:

Users just want video to work. You Mozilla people are such idealists! Yes, that is the reason for Mozilla to exist.

As far as “existing” goes, this may be right. Were it not for idealists, Mozilla may not have survived as long as it did without a successful product. Firefox 1.0 shipped November 2004; Mozilla was open-sourced March 1998. There’s a variety of reasons it took so long (including the questionable decision to rewrite), but there’s little disagreement that idealism helped keep the dream alive.

But the article is less about Mozilla and more about Firefox, and I’d wager to say people in this context read “to exist” as more as “to have succeeded” than “to have been created in the first place”. And in that, I couldn’t disagree more.

“Free software idealism” may have played a big role in those initial six years of not much visibly going on: alpha geeks enjoyed tinkering with the bits and pieces of code, and tried various approaches (particularly Seamonkey), and eventually settled for something far simpler (which evolved from m/b through Phoenix and Firebird into Firefox). That wasn’t what brought Firefox to the masses, though. The masses don’t care about the license. They don’t care to take a look at code. They do care that it’s free as in gratis, that it works, and that it works better than what they were used to. And what they were used to was awful, because it was IE 6.

Firefox 1.0 was the fortunate (and this is part of what significantly accelerated development those days) situation of IE 6 having a deservedly horrible situation and no proper competition, aside from alternatives nobody cared about, and ones even fewer people cared about. A combination of beta geeks¹ — those folks who fix their friends’/neighbors’/relatives’ computers — and the media made Firefox a huge success, and they had IE 6’s suckiness (particularly in the realm of security, or lack thereof), Microsoft’s refusal to provide new versions, and Firefox including cool features with it as good arguments.

In short, Firefox was a free and for the most part far superior alternative, and people had their beta geek friend to help them set it up. That is why it succeeded. I consider it foolish to believe that free software idealism pushed Firefox to the masses. It merely helped ignite its beginnings.

And therefore, we must ask ourselves which is more important: more idealism that may or may not make a difference another six years from now, or a solution right now that users will be pleased with?

I’ll take Pragmatic Choices For Consumers for $500.

1. Hereby trademarked. ↩

Color me skeptical.

• It runs risk of essentially becoming a 21st-century version of the ‘groupware’ concept. And we all know how well that worked out for, say, Lotus Notes. Anyone who hasn’t should read Groupware Bad, for it is one of the most insightful articles on some of the things that went wrong with 1990s-era software development. Granted, Wave is a lot more user-centric than previous attempts at this (which were tainted with corporate/”enterprise” orientation) — but the complexity of trying to solve too many problems at a time remains.
• I’ve seen it suggested by several people that “this is why Google didn’t buy Twitter”, or “just like with Gmail and Maps, Google gets this one right”. But Twitter, Gmail and Maps all have something Wave does not: they’re just the right amount of simple. (Arguably, Twitter takes simple to the extreme.)
• The complexity also means it’s non-trivial to comprehend and dive into. Yes, you can start off just creating a new “wave” and not use most of the other features, but do you even understand at that point what a wave is? Is it a document? Is it a conversation? Definitions include: “In simple terms Google Wave can be thought of like an ajax spreadsheet over XMPP.”, “a web application and computing platform designed to bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking, with a strong collaborative focus, mixed with spellchecker and translator extensions, which are able to work in concert, in real-time.” and “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web.” None of those strike me as explainable to someone in plain English over coffee.
• It’s technologically impressive, and I’m glad they’re implementing almost all the features in HTML 5 (one feature, as mentioned in the demo, requires Gears, though it has been submitted for standardization consideration), rather than Flash, Silverlight or worse. But whereas Google unsurprisingly considers the fact that it’s all a Web app a good thing, I for one would much rather work with something native. Technology aside, the browser by design limits the way I can interact. A native app could provide a status item in the menu bar, could notify (say, through Growl) of new or changed waves, etc.

On the positive side:

• The use of XMPP should make native clients very feasible.
• Anything that pushes HTML 5 further into the mainstream is good. Flash and Silverlight cannot die soon enough. JavaFX thankfully hasn’t really ever left its womb.
• Firefly references.
• Google’s t-shirt designers manage to make a drop shadow look like sweat. I will pretend to assume this was deliberate.

Others’ views:

[P]ossibly the most Microsoft-y thing I’ve ever seen come out of Google. This is not intended as a compliment, by the way.

Tweet by Jeff Atwood

I don’t understand what it is. It seems not just technically complex but also conceptually complex. Communication systems that succeed are usually conceptually simple.

Post by John Gruber

P.S.: I cringed when everyone ooh’d over the collaborative text editing demo. Not just because everyone should have realized that this has been possible long ago, as proven by SubEthaEdit and similar apps like Gobby — but also because I really wish such technology would be more standardized by now. There is no good reason IDEs (Coda aside), for instance, still don’t have such a feature.

I can stab someone with a knife, write a letter of blackmail with vi¹, and infringe upon copyright with a browser. It doesn’t mean that a knife, a text editor or a Web browser are predestined to allow such questionable actions; at the end of the day, they’re just tools.

And Riveal, too, is just a tool. What you do with it is up to you: you could explore the vast amount of art in the games, you could put some of the music in your library, or you could put it all on BitTorrent and share it with others. The implications aren’t for Riveal or its developer to deal with. It’s a good tool that can arguably be used for “bad” purposes — and even in the worst case, the harm done is limited at best. Because of the potential harm, though, author Ron Hayter was mindful enough to put up a disclaimer:

Don’t steal music. Or sounds or movies or pictures.

Much of the content extracted by Riveal is protected by copyright. Your journals, KI images, and avatar portraits belong to you but the rest does not. Please respect the rights of the copyright owners and do not redistribute their work without their permission.

Little did he know this would one day be interpreted exactly the opposite way as intended by someone. In the deleted, mirrored, now reinstated thread, Artic_Wagon passes on the news of a new version of Riveal, now supporting the iPhone/iPod touch port of Myst. But veralun locks the thread, citing the above disclaimer and then a forum rule:

Copyrighted material – No posting of copyrighted material. Links to copyrighted material should only be to the copyright holder of that material or a sanctioned holder.

For anything further, though, I’ll let SFT speak:

I’ve seen you stupidly lock threads that don’t deserve it, but your locking of the Riveal thread takes the cake. Riveal contains no copyrighted material. It lets you listen to sounds or look at game images for your own, personal, fair, legal use. It can’t even be used to directly infringe copyright; it simply gives you access to things that you can subsequently use to infringe copyright with completely different tools.

And speaking of “tools”, you, veralun, either are massively ignorant and lacking in common sense or are maliciously complying with the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit in an effort to grandstand and show your importance. I don’t know which of the two it is, but it needs to stop.

Please.

SFT

This sort of stupidity is comparable only to Apple rejecting an eBook reader because you might read the Kama Sutra with it. Just like you could with, say, the built-in browser.

1. Or with emacs. ↩

Some time in the last year or two, domain names asking a simple yes-or-no question have started popping up.¹ The earliest examples I can think of would be Is it friday? and Is it Christmas?, neither of which have a hard-to-guess URL.

While an almost absurd amount of minimalism (coupled with unorthodoxly large font sizes) is typical, such sites have become somewhat less devoid of content recently. One such example, Are the iPhone APIs public yet? by Peter Hosey, even goes so far as to detail the provided answer in several paragraphs. An RSS feed alerts you when the answer changes (which, by now, it has).

And then there’s MORE. Uru, and the inevitably coupled Cyan Worlds, has been a rather tragic story especially for us more involved fans, and the most recent (vague) prospect has been MORE. With the indefinite hold of that, fellow fan vid has been asking “Is it MORE yet?”.

You can question, as I do, the effect (or lack thereof) this may have on much of anything. If the goal is the change the answer to the question, whose responsibility is it to do so?

Well, I have taken it on my responsibility to at least pose the question at a more public, permanent place. Is It MORE Yet?, in addition to giving a straight answer, also encourages visitors to do something about it, even if it is so little as to read or reply to vid’s thread.

After so many years, it is easy to give up hope. I personally find, as a hidden gem on the site suggests, that the goal isn’t quite as clearly defined as “just bring Uru online again”. But I’m also interested in everyone else coming up with their own answers.

1. Has anyone coined a term for these yet? ↩

Congrats on shipping the second beta.¹ It achieves more than I had expected, and makes 7 look more like a stop-gap release.

The Good

• 

  Tabs automatically grouped and colored by “trail”. I can see myself getting used to those fast.
  The first-run assistant is now a dialog, rather than an obnoxious, slow-to-load Web page. It still has too many steps, though.

• Per-tab crash recovery without relaunching. The one thing I’ve always missed from IE in other browsers was its optional ability to launch one process per window, so having one window crash wasn’t quite as bad. They’ve apparently improved this to work for each tab! Nice. Crashes are a reality in any browser engine I’ve tried as soon as it comes to complex pages, whether through JavaScript parsing errors, messy markup or Flash, which is why you see features like Firefox session recovery. This sounds even better.
• Support for DOM Storage. This came as quite a surprise to me. Also sweet: Selectors API. The spec gives the perfect example of what makes this awesome:

  var cells = document.querySelectorAll("#score>tbody>td:nth-of-type(2)");

• 
  

  AwesomeBar-like autocomplete enhancements. Not just for the location bar, but the search bar as well. Really enjoying the way it lets you pick between search providers. They also now have a Firefox-/Safari 3-like Find bar, although the highlighting isn’t quite as pretty.

• Not quite so sure I’ll get used to features like Accelerators and Web Slices (it’s far too early to tell), but they deserve mention anyway for attempting something new.

The Not-So-Good

• Two “Tools” menus. Sure, it’s a beta, but it’s “feature-complete”, which I interpret to mean that all that’s left is bug fixes. You know, like… in a beta. With Internet Explorer 7, they decided to drop the menu bar (with an opt-in means of turning it back on) to bring the app somewhat more in line with the Vista chrome. They eventually reverted that default.

  Now, with IE8, they’re actually adding menus to the toolbar; many of their menu items already exist in the menu bar, but look different (they have no icon), and are sometimes ordered differently. “Compatibility View”, for example, exists in Tools (the menu item), Tools (the toolbar item), Page (another toolbar item) and to the right of the location bar (but only sometimes). Tools (menu) includes “Windows Update”, but Tools (toolbar) does not, whereas Safety does. Conversely, Tools (toolbar) includes “Explorer Bars”, but in the menu bar, that’s in “View”.

  It’s like two UI teams are feverishly competing against each other. FWIW, the toolbar has a much cleaner layout, but resides at a bizarre, completely non-standard and unique place.

  Sure, they put the menu bar back because people expected certain menu items at certain locations. Tough. Clean up the menu bar, but this time, do it properly, and then leave it in. Make the toolbar a toolbar. You know, with commonly-used items. But most of all, stop giving the impression that you can’t make up your mind.

• 

  As much as they have clearly put work into improving Web standards support, 21 is not a good Acid 3 score for a browser scheduled to ship in late 2008. One redditor appropriately jokes that the score hasn’t improved one bit since IE7’s 12; a text reversal bug has merely been introduced.

  And, by the way, I’ll spare you the sight of this blog on IE8. Maybe for 9?

The Truly Ugly

• The update experience sucks. That there’s a document of upgrading guidelines really says it all. Oh, and let me just quote this priceless series of instructions:

  To avoid getting into this situation, we strongly encourage you to follow these steps before installing Internet Explorer Beta 2:

  • Uninstall Windows XP SP3
  • Uninstall IE8 Beta1
  • Re- install Windows XP SP3
  • Install IE8 Beta2

  If you don’t, you won’t be able to downgrade back to IE7, but only if you’ve installed IE 8 beta 1 before installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. Which isn’t an unusual scenario at all.

  Oh, how I wish they could just bundle such betas in a little sandbox-esque environment which would allow for clean uninstalling. You could call it a “folder”, or perhaps a “directory”, and then run multiple versions side-by-side, and even have a tool that lets you conveniently test several different versions. The mind boggles. Microsoft’s solution? A complete Windows XP VM download.

• Microsoft can only be partially blamed for this, but it will be a long ways until we can take much advantage of IE8’s developer improvements. Just this week, I had the frightening experience of a server with 18 important updates that weren’t installed. Needless to say, it also still had IE 6.

Oh, and it doesn’t come with a free pony.

1. By calling this beta “feature-complete”, aren’t they essentially retroactively calling beta 1 an alpha? ↩