Chrome is 100% compliant without extraneous h264 support. The HTML5 spec contains no requirement for h264. If you want to blame anyone then blame the W3C workin

Chrome is 100% compliant without extraneous h264 support. The HTML5 spec contains no requirement for h264. If you want to blame anyone then blame the W3C working group for not specifying a codec. As of now h264 is on the same level as ActiveX and VBScript so you might as well ask for Chrome to support those, too. Granted, in this respect WebM is not perfect either. But at least WebM is meets the criteria to be a part of the W3C spec without modification whereas currently h264 does not. tl;dr Don't complain if Chrome uses WebM for <video>. My browser will only support Dirac and we're both right.