Google defends H.264 removal from Chrome, says WebM plug-ins coming to Safari and IE9

Google renewed a heated discussion when it said it was dropping H.264 support from Chrome's HTML5 video tag last week, but it seems the company's ready and willing to push its WebM alternative video format hard -- not only is hardware decoder IP now available for the VP8 codec, but the project team is presently readying WebM plug-ins for Safari and Internet Explorer 9, neither of which include it themselves. As to the little matter of whether any of this is the right move for the web at large, we'll paraphrase what Google had to say for itself: H.264 licenses cost money; Firefox and Opera don't support H.264 either; and big companies like Google are helping the little guy by championing this open alternative. We have to say, the eternal optimist in us is cheering them on. Oh, and the linguist in us, too. Read Google's own words at our source link, and decide for yourself.