Tumble, coil & fumble

You’ve probably read it in another tab before, Google ditched h.264 support in their open source Chromium browser. Chromium is what Google Chrome is before it becomes Chrome. Like when you download WebKit “Pure” before it becomes Safari. While both use the same WebKit engine something fundamentally different divides them as of yesterday.

Google has no real understanding of the markets that drive it apparently. Not only is h.264 a more modern and vastly superior codec compared to Google’s WebM codec mix, it also is the only ISO standard of the two.

What does it mean for content producers? You may need to treat Google Chrome as a separate output in the near future. ‘MAY’ being the operative word. The one thing Google did was to take away the rest-safety their Chrome platform had. Now it is as unsafe as WebM’s patent situation. You never know when the day comes when Google pulls the rug out underneath you.

A lot of the Google Chrome Web Store apps uses h.264 in native video without a plug-in. Unsafe ground as of yesterday.

Google’s excuse for pulling h.264 is that it is “not open” not true, it is open, it’s just not free. Quality still costs money, in any industry. To them it’s like the perceived Firefox mantra “free at all cost”, doesn’t matter if it’s crap, at least it didn’t cost anything but time. Time apparently is a free commodity on their home planet.

Oddly enough however Adobe’s Flash plug-in which is as proprietary and closed-source as it gets, is still part of the bundle. What are they hoping to get from Adobe for that?

Adobe is slowly getting the idea of open standards and companies have realized that Flash is a limiting factor rather than an enabler. Humping Adobe’s leg is just going to leave Google spent and a wet stain on Adobe’s pin-stripe suit.