Marco.org: Everyone else is arguing about HTML 5’s video codecs. Why can’t I?

marco:

I wrote this 18 months ago when Mozilla announced that Firefox wouldn’t support H.264 in the <video> tag, instead supporting only the free, open-source, fairly crappy Ogg Theora codec that nobody uses:

By not supporting the practical [H.264] format, Mozilla isn’t making a brave statement or taking a stand: they’re just keeping everyone on Flash and preventing meaningful adoption of HTML 5’s <video> element.

Change Mozilla to Google, and it’s the same argument today.

But Google’s reason to drop H.264 has nothing to do with any moral or political issue about free or “open” software. I hope they’re not fooling anyone with that.