Or are you saying that every browser should include support for the widest range of codecs that it possibly can? No. Quite the opposite, actually. I am saying

Or are you saying that every browser should include support for the widest range of codecs that it possibly can? No. Quite the opposite, actually. I am saying that a reasonable approach would have been for the browsers to defer support to the operating system. Apple does this. Microsoft does this. Mozilla, Google, and Opera have instead chosen to limit support to only the codecs they implement in-browser. (I say "would have been" because there's practically zero chance of this happening now.) One effect of this is that even on a system with h.264 already present you can't view it in those browsers. This is not a requirement of the HTML5 spec, an h.264 licensing issue or a technically intractable problem, but a choice made by those browser vendors to favor certain codecs. The point is that while the debate is frequently framed as a standards issue it's really more about the ideology of implementing things on top of those standards.