Flash and h264 are completely different and are not at all equivalent. Google doesn't support Flash. Google supports BROWSER PLUGINS. And Flash is by far the m

Flash and h264 are completely different and are not at all equivalent. Google doesn't support Flash. Google supports BROWSER PLUGINS. And Flash is by far the most popular plugin to the point of being ubiquitous. Google CAN'T drop support for Flash without dropping support for plugins. Google could, symbolically, stop bundling the Flash plugin. But really they believe in an open plugin standard which allows for browser extensions. By comparison h264 is more like a proprietary, out of spec superset of the HTML standard. Building h264 support directly into the browser is equivalent to supporting IE specific markup. Or maybe even ActiveX. It just exposes Google to patent suits. The real problem is the W3C needs to recommend a codec for the HTML5 video tag. Until they do there is no chance for standards compliant implementations to exist because there is no standard. h264 is not a solution because it's not part of the standard. And it won't become part of the standard until it loses the patent encumberance.