The argument with the licensing fees for Mozilla to implement h.264 is probably a non-issue, and it doesn't do justice to frame it as such. The Mozilla Corporation does have a revenue stream (largely from Google) and MPEG-LA would probably be willing to allow Mozilla to license without paying the fees given their pivotal role in the fate of the de-facto standard. Operating systems often provide h.264 decoder APIs, like in QuickTime and Windows Media Player that they could use to circumvent the licensing fees.
Mozilla is doing it entirely out of ideology (and sticks to their ideology much more than Google usually does).
Mozilla has said [0] that they could pay the $5M/year but they won't because 1) it means content producers have to pay money to obtain licenses and more importantly 2) other people cannot create mozilla forks without licensing h264 themselves.
Ideology aside, what's the point? Like the article quotes, "if you are a company that gives away your product - how the hell are you supposed to justify paying for such a license when there is a perfectly good alternative that doesn't cost you money?"
Do you know how many engineers Mozilla can get for $5 million a year? Or how many ads they can buy for $5 million? Or how much beer? The point is- just because they have the money doesn't mean this is a good way to spend it.
Part of H.264 being a RAND standard (though not an "Open Standard" by the generally accepted definitions, since it's not royalty free) is that they can't cut special deals like that.
Don't get me wrong there's already special deals baked into the fee format (like maximum fee caps for the big insider companies that could move the market on their own if you pissed them off) but it is in some ways "non-discriminatory", which is the ND in RAND, which would stop them doing a deal.
Why would Opera get a special deal? It's not like they make an open source browser. It seems misplaced to give handouts to a publicly traded company, with offices in ten countries, and who receive $80 million in revenues a year.
But that's exactly the point. You can give Mozilla special treatment, but that only underlines the fact browser makers will have to pay unless you specifically exempt them.
Mozilla is doing it entirely out of ideology (and sticks to their ideology much more than Google usually does).