Google Drops H.264!

A lot of people in that comments section don't care one bit about the fact that H.264 was a closed standard and patent-encumbered. Pity.

Is it hypocritical that Chrome is dropping H.264 from Chrome and YouTube but not Adobe Flash? Maybe if Flash wasn't 100x as popular as H.264 video. Google is being pragmatic, and at the end of the day, pragmatism with some nice outcomes on the side of software freedom is the most that the free software community can really expect from a mega-corporation like Google.

Like you said it's a pragmatic issue for them. The reason they didn't drop flash is because flash does currently or will in the future (not sure, I don't really keep up w/ flash) support webM (http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_vp8.html). The only reason I know that is because I'm very interested in webM and when they first announced in adobe was there saying they will support it with their player. My logic indicates that google doesn't want to make an enemy of adobe because adobe is probably their best way to get webM out to joe sixpack. Joe sixpack probably uses IE with flash. If he has flash it will play webM video and google's video container is much more likely to come out on top. But if they remove flash and piss off adobe well that is bad juju.

Flash is kinda like a double edged sword w/ webM. something like 95%+ computers have it installed. Once the flash player supports webM that means all those computers will be able to play it and it will likely be adopted very quickly. Once it becomes mainstream then people will be able to drop adobe because support will be built into the browser automatically like firefox. The only problem is to do this we have to use some cruddy non-free software like flash.