Distributed Life

As you probably already know, some days ago Google announced that they will not support H.264 video codec in the future releases of Chrome (announcement).The <video> html tag, in Chrome, will support WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other open codecs in the future.

After this announcement, Opera decided to support Google’s decision on dropping the H.264 codec. Thomas Ford, Senior Communications Manager, Opera, told Muktware, “Actually, Opera has never supported H.264. We have always chosen to support open formats like Ogg Theora and WebM. In fact, Opera was the first company to propose the <video> tag, and when we did, we did it with Ogg. Simply put, we welcome Google’s decision to rely on open codecs for HTML5 video.”. Indeed, Opera was the company that proposed the <video> tag in an post back in 2007.

I have to disagree with both companies’ decision, because there is a big difference between better supporting and promoting open standards and forcing the drop of a proprietary technology that is currently so commonly used..