So Much For Standards, Google Says WebM Plugins Coming Soon For Safari And IE9
January 14, 2011 at 16:32 PM EST
We've already done a full breakdown of Google's clarification of their H.264 pullout today. But buried in their post is another interesting nugget worth highlighting by itself: WebM plugins are coming shortly for Safari and IE9. Yes, plugins. This is both humorous and terrifying on a few levels. First and formost, the point of all of this H.264/WebM stuff is so that the web can shift to an HTML5 video standard going forward. Of course, since neither IE nor Safari will support Google's, Mozilla's, and Opera's preferred codec for that standard, we're right back to plugin land! Why don't we just call WebM, Flash 2.0?