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Microsoft Tips the Scale In Favor of HTML 5
aabelro writes "Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, has announced that IE9 will use only the H.264 standard to play HTML 5 video. Microsoft seems to have become very committed to HTML 5, while Flash loses even more ground. The announcement came the same day Steve Jobs detailed why Apple does not accept Flash on iPhone and iPad."
It is quite unsurprising they will support only h.264. They are a licensor in the h.264 patent pool (just like Apple) so it does not cost them anything and they actually get money when somebody licenses it, so it makes sense to endorse its use. If something else (theora, vp8,...) will actually win the html5 video format war, they can always add the support later. Obviously I am joking about this part :)
Increasing Silverlight's market share is what this is about.
Basically, Microsoft is going to embrace HTML5 and use it to hurt Flash, it'll then start to phase HTML5 support out once Flash's market share starts to take a large enough hit and talk about how HTML5 doesn't have enough support or doesn't "have all the features our users demand," then it will start to pimp Silverlight, integrated it with the next Xbox and so forth and remove "upgrade" all the devs to their Expression platform for developing Silverlight apps.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It is clear that the move is not against Flash, the Flash plugin will always be there.
It is a preemptive move against Google's VP8 in particular and open source in general. Basically they are creating a problem for Firefox (which has stated that they won't support H.264) and trying to stop Google's VP8 before it can be successful.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
1. This places an additional burden on open source browsers to keep pace with the underlying platform WRT performance. History shows they will likely lag significantly.
2. This doesn't address features at all. Both Apple and MS will make sure that the HTML5 spec is always significantly less featureful than the native application platforms.
The result will be that the highest quality applications will need to be written to native platforms, not an OS neutral web platform. This means hardware and/or software vendor lock in, which is just what Apple and MS want.
This is Java all over again. MS embraced and extended it. They paid a billion in damages for doing so, but it was money well spent to cripple a potentially game changing, OS neutral platform.
Apple claimed to be the best Java platform bar none. You could even write native cocoa apps in java. Then, when Apple had leveraged their "open standards" act to attract enough developer mind share, they began systematically treating Java as a second class citizen. Launch a java app and get a frightening warning:
"! The application SuchAndSuch is requesting access to your computer"
You don't get this kind of warning running a native app of course.
And now you can't write cocoa apps using java anymore either. What a surprise.
MS Does embrace and extend. Apple does embrace and marginalize. Same end result.
Apple and MS are not your friend - they want your money. Google is not your friend either, but at least they don't want your money - they want advertisers' money. The lesser of two evils.