Yeah I've already read that a couple of days ago, and I know what the argument is. I still disagree with it.
9. "The market share of browsers that support H.264 exceeds WebM capable browsers"
Google's online advertising monopoly is working on overdrive to ensure that won't happen.
He suggests this is a good thing? "Oh, lucky Google has that advertising monopoly to make everyone else do what they want."
Honestly though, advertising monopoly or not I cannot see how Google is going to convince people to use Chrome when they are doing shit like this. Pretty much every user comment on both their Chromium blog entries on this topic is negative, and that is on their blog, so I would assume the commenters are actually Chrome fans. They are getting a shellacing for it from a lot of major tech news sites and web design sites. The only people who seem to be in their corner at the moment are FSF-type guys, which is not really a positive thing.
8. "Firefox users would be able to view H.264 content using Microsoft's plugin"
Notice the word "plugin". It means that we're basically removing HTML5 video, and returning to plugins. All the benefits of native video disappear just like that
He's being hypocritical here, because this is exactly what Google is suggesting to do for IE9 & Safari users - create a WebM plugin. He criticises the use of plugins, yet lauds Google retaining Flash plugin as pragmatic, and calls it a red herring when it's actually a really, really big part of the conversation. Why are they leaving Flash plugin support in? He suggests it's because they are being pragmatic, but if they wanted to be pragmatic why not just leave things as they were and keep supporting both WebM and h.264, as they have been? That would have been the
pragmatic option.
Here is another interesting couple of facts:
1. In
this Engadget review of the GoogleTV device Google reps told them that even though the GoogleTV can handle HTML5 video playback they force users to the Flash-based versions of files because then they can serve ads.
Google's own YouTube -- one of the first sites to provide HTML5 video playback -- loads up its Flash player on Google TV, because that's the only way Google can serve ads during the content. Seriously -- that's what Google told us.
2. Google makes money from advertising. It is a tech company, sure. But its money comes from advertising. Check this table of incomes out:
http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.htmlIf it's not immediately obvious to you, here is a simplified table:
So they can only serve Youtube ads using Flash, and they make all their money from ads. Hey, I wonder why they like Flash so much?
Just because a format is widespread offline does not mean that it is suitable for use on the web. Since the web requires open standards, H.264 is not suitable as the primary format for video on the web, by definition.
Is he being serious? By his definition gifs should never have been suitable for the web, but at one time they were one of the main image types used everywhere. The main reason they're being superceded by PNGs is because PNGs give better quality images. The web is not something unique, it is another media transmission medium. A lot of people already have their media encoded in h.264 for use elsewhere, the path of least resistance means that they'll prefer to keep it that way instead of re-encoding everything in WebM just for the web. I can shoot h.264 video on a number of devices I already own, and watch it on any number of other devices I already own. I know that (as he says) I upload it to youtube it'll re-encode it for me, but youtube isn't the only game in town, nor should they expect the website to do all the work converting things over to the magical web-suitable WebM format.