Snippet #704

Google Chrome bombshell: "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." Bad news for iPad/iPhone users; H.264 is a great codec, despite being non-free, and Apple has been pushing it hard for a long time now, but this will hurt it badly. By further fragmenting browser support for the HTML 5 <video> tag, in the worst case scenario this will end up contributing to a resurgence in Flash, a ghastly technology with an unrivaled tally of browser-crashing bugs under its belt. Looks like we have at least a few more years of video-on-the-web pain ahead of us.