On the one hand, this makes me very sad - I'd much rather live in a world where patent-free, unencumbered video codecs are the only ones worth dealing with, and I'd like to support efforts toward that goal.

On the other hand, I have Flash and the full suite of proprietary codecs installed on my Ubuntu machine for practical reasons, so I can't really be angry at Mozilla for conforming to the same trends.

I wonder if Xiph.org takes donations...

This is something I've been waiting for. Browsers should be agnostic to formats the OS is willing to play. If my system is happy to play H.264 then let me do it. This has always seemed to me to be the best option, allowing users to decide what they can play and allows browsers to avoid patent issues.

I hate software patents as much as the next person but put control in the hands of the user.