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by codazoda·11y ago·view on hn ↗
There's a comment there indicating that FF has done the same in the past with an H.264 blob.

The conspiracist in me wonders why both these major browsers have downloaded and maybe executed binary blobs. Is it purely a convenience feature in the browser? Is it a secret order? That last question would have been silly a decade ago but we all know it's entirely possible now.

4 comments
the open h.264 blob thing is annoying, but it's supposed to be a reproducible build of open source software.

The reason why there's a blob is because for that binary, Cisco pays the patent licenses.

So you can verify the source for any issues, verify whether it matches the binary, and work around MPEG-LA licensing at the same time (there are caps, and Cisco seems to have calculated that even when running into them, they're still better off with having webrtc support h.264 everywhere).

Firefox's blob is open source, though (OpenH264 is on Github and is BSD-licensed).
Firefox has similar code to download the proprietary EME plugin but it prompts the user about it first, which Chromium could be doing here.