I don’t think the reason was technical. Firefox has supported WebM (a subset of Matroska) for 11 years, and whatever code they had probably would have been enough for most Matroska files, assuming the codecs are also supported.

However, Matroska itself was only officially standardised last October despite being in use all these years. That was probably what convinced them to add support.

The AI Epic has so much higher priority, you know?

Prioritization probably.

They are busy keeping up with engineering teams 4x their size for their browser competition… (~500 engineers building Firefox vs ~2000 building chrome)

Of a million potential features, you can only choose a subset to work on. This one was likely low impact and a low enough use case priority that it got regularly bumped under higher priority work.

This is just the way… Well… Anything with limited resources works.

Happy they finally got around for this.

probably licensing.

It’s more than important. It’s vital to me. I host TV series ripped from discs on my NAS through HTTP and play them back on another machine.

For years I used an extension which sends the URL to VLC for playback via HTTP. Nowadays I got rid of the extension and just drag and drop. That doesn’t mark the link as clicked, though. It’s hard to track the progress this way.