The consumer will have to suffer through hot laptops and short battery life, and most won't know why. I'll give you this for Safari, but I don't think IE9 will

The consumer will have to suffer through hot laptops and short battery life, and most won't know why. I'll give you this for Safari, but I don't think IE9 will have enough of an adoption rate to make this a noticeable effect. Average people are unlikely to switch browsers, and they're also unlikely to upgrade (though I wish I had some statistics here). They're likely to be using IE6/7/8, without HMTL5 anyway, especially with IE9 not supporting XP. From a web standpoint, I wish we had been having this discussion 3 years ago. H.264 seems to have won. Wholeheartedly agreed.