Mozilla supports HTML5 video now and plans to continue supporting it. The only thing is that Mozilla doesn't support H.264 currently, but probably will in the future. Mozilla has been on the Thedora/OGG bandwagon with Opera for awhile now, plus Mozilla supports Google's free WebM - but they are bending over to provide H.264 support which is what Apple and Microsoft are backing (and own a piece of).

Linux users have it better then Windows and Mac users right now, there are more alternatives to Flash right now for Linux than for both Mac and Windows combined.

I completely agree. If you keep up with the buzzwords, FF clearly supports a lot of alternatives. So, as I said, it *seems* like Mozilla is betting on HTML5 fixing everything.

However, I don't think that has been clearly stated. Mozilla has been clear about *not* supporting some things, like Pepper. But, they haven't articulated their vision as to how this transitional period will play out, as far as I know.

So, what do we do in the mean time? What's the plan, Mozilla?

Possible answers:

(1) The transition to HTML5 content occurred already and is being kept a secret. Most Web videos are available in HTML5 and libre formats. If this is the case, Mozilla should explain how we can get that content. For example:

 * There exists some option I can set in FF that tells web-sites I want HTML5 content.

 * If you disable Flash plug-in in FF, some web-sites will fail-over to HTML5.  It looks like this is what happens at YouTube.  (But, how is anyone using Flash (in vain) supposed to guess that?  Is this the new standard?  Is everyone adopting this approach?  If we all do this, will it make the transition faster?

(2) There isn't any currently viable alternative to Flash. But, you can do ___ to watch any flash video you want. (As far as I know, gnash stopped working too, so I'm not sure what could go in in the blank. Lightspark?)

Really? The plan is that everyone stops watching videos on-line?

This has been quite an adventure.

First, the good news. I found *two* ways to play flash video without flash.

1) Totem (the Gnome media player) w/ the "vegas" Firefox plugin

2) VLC with the NPAPI browser plugin

The road to these plugins also brought me to the understanding that the problem with Flash video is not so much Flash but the h.264 encoding. These plugins enable Flash video support, but do not support other Flash content. That's fine; I started this thread to address video issues, specifically.

That's brings me to the bad news. These solutions appear to have been around for a *very long time.* The vegas plugin for Totem has been around since November 2011. I couldn't find when VLC got h.264 support, but it must have been several years ago, at least. Why didn't anyone suggest these when I asked about alternatives?

More bad news: It seems Mozilla forgot to tell anyone that it changed it's stance on video streaming months ago. They are now actively working on incorporating h.264 support into FF Aurora after originally rejecting this option a long time ago. That's fine, but why is this a secret! I found some blog posts about it from insiders, but there is nothing about it on the Mozilla.org and not even in there press releases.

Here is the full back story I was looking for: https://brendaneich.com/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/

Short answer: Mozilla and the OSS universe loose one; h.264 and the patent owners win one. FF Aurora beta supports h.264, now, and FF desktop users will still need to use Flash Video plugins to watch videos.

My only remaining question is why wasn't this a front-page story on Mozilla.org?