Why Google was correct in Chrome dropping H.264

Google as a business is well within it's rights to do whatever it wants to further it's business interests, and/or tick off it's competition. Let's just not keep saying it's all for the user.

The real question is will Google follow through and remove all support for H.264 from YouTube. That will be the telling sign that they're serious.

Chrome ships with Flash. Flash plays H.264. Thus, Chrome still supports H.264, now it just has to go through Flash.<p>There are Android phones with H.264 hardware support. There are no Android phones with WebM hardware support (software support, yes).<p>So... there is no point to converting YouTube videos to WebM: it doesn't benefit Android, it doesn't benefit Chrome. It would be a pointless waste of space.

HTML5 video is DOA and Google might as well lay the groundwork for the next round. Major content providers don't support HTML5 video. Netflix, Hulu, and anyone else with intellectual property to protect want nothing to do with it. So we're going to need to keep our proprietary plugins and our proprietary apps through the HTML5 era. Even YouTube needs to stay proprietary.<p>So if HTML5 video is DOA, why support h264? Why be democratic when people are going to use Flash and Silverlight anyway? At least this way there might be a real push for the standard HTML5 video codec to be free and open source.