> "I'd not go as far as calling this ridiculous. True, this feels wrong, but it's a fairly weighted decision - average users would tolerate "old" Flash-based fa

> "I'd not go as far as calling this ridiculous. True, this feels wrong, but it's a fairly weighted decision - average users would tolerate "old" Flash-based fallback instead of native HTML5 <video> (most users won't understand the difference), but wouldn't tolerate lack of ability to play Farmville." I agree that cutting out Flash would have a MUCH bigger detrimental impact on the user experience than dropping H.264 does; mentioning this was just to point out that their seemingly altruistic-ideological claims about the “openness of the Web” were fundamentally fallacious. If openness of the web was truly so important to them, how do they justify dropping H.264 but not Flash, which is arguably far more threatening to the "openness of the web"? > "Unfortunately, "not right now" means "never". Google is already late with this decision, but as HTML5 <video> is not too widespread, there's still a possibility that they'll overturn the situation." I don't believe this is really true. WebM, as it stands, will at some point take off, be put to the test in court trials over patent litigation, probably come out clean or with a one-time-then-safe-forever settlement, and take over market share from H.264. This seems almost inevitable to me, simply because right now H.264 is the de-facto standard but it has nowhere to go under its current licensing scheme. It's not compatible with the web as it is today. So the only thing that would keep WebM from taking off is MPEG LA changing H.264 to be "web compatible" i.e. royalty-free for use on the Web. But if they do that, then there's no real need for WebM to take over, either.