Mozilla has not yet supported the H.264 video technology but the folks over at Redmond have decided to release their own plug-in that will allow Windows 7 users to make use of it.

H.264 is used across a wide variety of web applications. YouTube, iTunes, Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight all use the technology but Mozilla dislikes the technology due to its patent licensing royalties. Google has introduced its own open-source technology, WebM, that it plans to support for the HTML5 video specification. The current web war between H.264 and WebM over HTML5 means developers have a hard choice over which codec to support for their HTML5 videos. Until the war pans out and all browsers support the same codec then it’s a mixed bag.

Microsoft’s introduction of H.264 for Firefox aims to “bridge” an interoperability gap according to the software giant. “H.264 is a widely-used industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support. This standardization allows users to easily take what they’ve recorded on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the web, and have it play in a web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support, such as on a PC with Windows 7,” said Claudio Caldato, Microsoft’s Interoperability Program Manager.

Microsoft says the plug-in is free and extends the functionality of an earlier plug-in for Firefox named Windows Media Player. The plug-in “enables web pages that that offer video in the H.264 format using standard W3C HTML5 to work in Firefox on Windows.”

Microsoft’s HTML5 extension for Windows Media Player Firefox plug-in is available here for Firefox 3.6+ Windows 7 users.