This move makes almost no sense to me. The “open” argument doesn’t hold water, as other codecs are just as likely to be limited by patents as h.264. And there’s nothing open about Flash, which is built in to Chrome. It’s a tired old argument. And we’ve seen plenty of evidence that Google doesn’t really care about open, anyway. So that can’t be the reason.
More importantly, all current Android phones have H.264 hardware decoding support built in. They don’t have any hardware support built in for any other kind of video. Which means that dropping H.264 support in the browser will lead to choppier, battery-draining video on all Android phones. They could keep h.264 support in the mobile browser, I suppose, but then, why drop it on the desktop? Doesn’t that just completely erode your ‘open’ argument, even to the blindest of fanboys?
Now, perhaps Google has some hardware up its sleeve for WebM (VP8) or Theora video decoding in future Android models. But even if it does, any current Android owner will be left out in the cold. But I guess Android users should be used to getting no support from Google and the carriers, anyway.
So what could the rationale possibly be for this move? Are they just trying to spite Apple? Trying to push people back towards Flash video, in some vain attempt to force Apple’s hand with Flash support? Seems desperate and, well, stupid to me. If they’re trying to force people to use WebM, this is a pretty stupid way to go about that, too. Web designers are already having enough trouble putting up videos for desktop vs. mobile; the last thing they want is to be creating separate files and special coding for different desktop browsers, plus different mobile devices. That’s IE/Netscape all over again, and it’s exactly what HTML5 is trying to resolve.
If anything, this move will only marginalize Chrome at a time when its support is really just getting started. It’s the sort of thing Microsoft did once its browser became completely dominant. Once everyone is using your product, change the way it functions so that all web designers need to cater to your browser only.
The problem is, Chrome is far from the dominant browser. People have other options—lots of them, in fact. So when they get to a site with H.264 video, and it doesn’t work, they’ll just start using another browser.
I don’t see how Google wins this one.
