Finding a more open, mobile-friendly
replacement for Flash video on the Web was
never going to be easy. But it's looking even
more difficult after Google's surprise
announcement yesterday that it will yank support
for the most widely used Flash replacement from
its Chrome browser.
The Mountain View, Calif., company broke
the news on a developer-oriented blog --
not the more obvious Chrome blog,
which itself adds to the weirdness of this
decision. Wrote product manager Mike
Jazayeri:
We expect even more rapid
innovation in the web media platform
in the coming year and are focusing
our investments in those technologies
that are developed and licensed based
on open web principles. ....
Specifically, we are supporting the
WebM (VP8) and Theora video
codecs, and will consider adding
support for other high-quality open
codecs in the future. Though H.264
plays an important role in video, as
our goal is to enable open innovation, support for
the codec will be removed and our resources
directed towards completely open codec
technologies.
A few words of explanation before the
abbreviations get too dense in this post. Right
now, most video on the Web comes in Adobe's
Flash format, which doesn't work on many
mobile devices (Apple has ruled it off-limits on the
iPhone and the iPad) and has performance,
maintenance and security issues on computers.
The most viable replacement for Flash is a file
format called H.264, which modern browsers
can play without any extra software plug-ins like
Flash and also works well in mobile devices.
Apple has anointed this format as its Flash
replacement, and so has Microsoft.
But Mozilla, the developers of the Firefox browser,
don't like H.264 because it carries licensing costs
for some Web uses and isn't an open-source
component, unlike Firefox itself.
Google inserted itself into this debate in May when
it proposed a different Flash successor, an open-
source, royalty-free format called WebM. (WebM
might still be vulnerable to patent-infringement
claims that could make it less than free to use, but
you could say the same about virtually any Web
technology .) Firefox and Chrome, along with the
Opera browser, quickly moved to support it, but
until yesterday's news Chrome had also
supported H.264 equally.
Now Google seems to think that Web developers
will follow its lead, which seems a bit ambitious
given that Chrome has only just crept up to 10
percent of the market.
Fortunately Chrome users won't be shut out of
Web video when Google yanks H.264 support--
they'll just wind up viewing it in Adobe's Flash
plug-in, which Google itself bundles in Chrome.
Yes, even though Flash itself is not "completely
open."
You have to wonder whether Google has thought
through this exercise in ideological purity --
especially if you note, as tech blogger John
Gruber did yesterday, that Google's own Android
and YouTube themselves support H.264. ZDNet's
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes had a different
description for this change of course: "Google
prepares to ruin Chrome browser."
What's your forecast for video viewing in
Chrome? Do you have a preference for what
replaces Flash, or are you sick of this whose-side-
are-you-on standards standoff?
Source: Http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2011/01/google_to_eject_h264_video_for.html
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