HTML5: Firefox without Flash

Over the past few days, I decided to purge Gnash and LightSpark from my laptop to see whether my Internet experience would be affected in any dramatic way. Amazingly, a number of sites seem to offer video content encoded in Theora (VP3) or WebM (VP8). Sadly, a handful of popular sites such as Vimeo insist upon using the H.264 (MPEG-4) CODEC, which cannot be safely supported on Free Software because of unclear licensing issues that might impose an ulterior usage fee onto the end-users.

The good news is that the Mozilla Foundation has decided to avoid the issue together: starting with the most recent release of the mobile version of Firefox, content decoding is offloaded to the platform's native media CODEC library. On most Free Software platforms, this means that Gstreamer will handle the content and, in turn, use gstreamer-plugins-bad to perform the decoding. However, Gstreamer support is still rather sketchy, as attested by this Debian bug report and thus disabled by default. This leaves me wondering how little is missing for this to properly work. Would either Canonical or Red Hat perhaps be interested in funding this?

Killing the console bell on Jaunty?

Every once in a while, rewrites in ALSA drivers or in desktop audio components (GNOME mixer or Gstreamer) result in an impossibility to completely mute the console bell. Until recently, ALSA offered a separate channel to control this. Since Jaunty (kernel 2.6.28, ALSA 1.0.18r3) came out, not anymore. As such, I was wondering how else could I mute the console bell?

Some people on Ubuntu Forum suggested blacklisting the pc-spkr kernel module, but this is entirely the wrong approach, as it completely kills sound output on this laptop's built-in speakers. I don't wanna completely lose sound support, I just wanna get rid of that annoying console bell!

Others recommended setting set bell-style none in /etc/inputrc but that only works for interactive shells. The console bell still rings e.g. whenever rebooting, probably because bash gets called as a non-interactive shell by init scripts. Actually, since Jaunty, restarting the system makes the bell ring not just once, but twice!

Can anyone think of any more permanent way of disabling the console bell in some global system setting?