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Google dropping h.264 support from Chrome

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Catfish_Man:
Chromium is not really used by anyone outside maybe some open source fans. It's just "Chrome, minus any proprietary bits"; so, I wouldn't focus on what Chromium does.

Immediate ramifications: things like youtube in html video mode won't work.
Long term ramifications: because things like that won't work, people won't make them, and Flash will continue to dominate (which is bad; my friend measured 2 hours better battery life on his laptop by uninstalling Flash).

Alex C:
Dammit. I don't really want to go back to Opera or Safari. I really only dig Chrome 'cuz I have a slightly unhealthy fascination with minimalist aesthetics and because I can afford not to be a power user these days. I don't even keep icons on my desktop because I think it's prettier that way. Firefox really isn't an option for me because I don't want to dick around with it just so it can be less fugly.

est:
Short answer is: what Catfish_Man said.

Long answer:

To be honest I did not know there was Chrome and Chromium, I have always thought they were different names for the same thing & they were saying that they were taking an idea from "ideal" to "execution" mode.

Anyway, after reviewing things it is b).  If you are really using Chromium, not just Chrome and you haven't noticed yet then I guess you probably won't care for the immediate future?  I don't know.  It's probably not really something that people will notice immediately, it's more that it'll be hobbling the future development of the web, and unnecessarily fracturing things just as they were starting to all come together.

Apple's been onboard the H.264 train for a while now, and IE9 will only support H.264 natively.  MS has also released a free Firefox plugin that will allow FF to use the native Win7 H.264 codec, so basically that is all the major players sewn up.  It was looking like H.264 was going to be the best bet, but now Google pulls this crap.  I know that a lot of people have been bitching about the licensing issues with H.264, but WebM is based on VP8, which is royalty free now but might not be in perpetuity

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100520/googles-royalty-free-webm-video-may-not-be-royalty-free-for-long/

so it's not much of a step in the right direction.

My main problem with this is that it confuses things at a time when all the major players looked to be agreeing on a single solution, and as flawed as that solution may have been there would at least have been a bunch of heavy-hitters in the same corner, working to sort the issue out. Now we'll have fragmentation & confusion.  If Google apply the same decision to their Android browser and move Youtube over to WebM instead of the H.264 they're using now for their HTML5 mode then we'll have one of those major players sitting off in a corner and clutching its toys to its chest in a huff while the rest of the world tries to get along together, which, to be frank, is fucked.

est:
It also annoys me to read things like this:


--- Quote from: Ars Technica ---Google appeared to favor the pragmatic approach and had opted to support both formats in its own browser, but is now moving towards a fully open approach
--- End quote ---

I know what they mean when they say it, but it seems a bit rich to be describing the removal of an option as an "open" approach or an improvement of any kind.

est:
A humorous piece by an msdn blogger named Tim Sneath: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2011/01/11/an-open-letter-from-the-president-of-the-united-states-of-google.aspx


--- Quote ---Though English plays an important role in speech today, as our goal is to enable open innovation, its further use as a form of communication in this country will be prohibited and our resources directed towards languages that are untainted by real-world usage.

These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give citizens using other languages an opportunity to translate the libraries of the world into Esperanto.
--- End quote ---

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