Chrome is a Google remix of Apple Safari. It’s a more business-oriented and nerd-oriented take on Apple’s browser. Google Chrome uses the Apple WebKit engine, which was released in January 2003 alongside Safari 1.0, many years before Chrome. Similarly, the browser engine in Android is the iPhone browser engine, Apple WebKit running on ARM. Apple makes WebKit, and Google remixes it. By definition, Apple is always first.

When Chrome OS ships, it will be essentially the open source part of Mac OS: a Unix core with a WebKit browser. Apple users have had that for 7 years now, as well as a native app platform. You can’t be pro-Chrome and be anti-Apple and make rational sense.

> What BS! Firefox has had this for months. apple leading the way?
> Hilarious! More like following behind… again.

Firefox is behind Apple WebKit. Mozilla is much more conservative than Apple. Safari was released in January 2003 alongside the Mozilla browser. Firefox was not even thought about yet at that time. The Google box in the upper right? From Safari. A more lightweight browser? Safari. Safari is 4.0 and Firefox is 3.5, Safari is 100/100 in Acid3 and Firefox is 83/100. Firefox is a great browser, but the idea that it’s ahead of Safari is just ridiculous.

If you are a Windows user, Safari seems late to the game, shipping a buggy Windows version in 2007, a couple of years after Firefox. But at that point Safari was 4 years old on the Mac, and WebKit was 5 years old on the Mac and Linux. Firefox was 2 years old.

> I would say that MP4 is limiting, why doesn’t apple implement
> ogg theora support in quicktime?

What you’re saying is like saying “I would say that C is limiting. Why doesn’t Linus Torvalds write the Linux kernel in JavaScript?” Because JavaScript doesn’t have the required features, and neither does Ogg. Because JavaScript is not what kernel developers write in, and Ogg is not what audio video developers produce.

Also, Ogg is not the consumer audio video standard. For the past 10 years, all consumer video devices have shipped with support for the ISO consumer audio video standard. It is not Ogg, it is MPEG-4 H.264. iPod and Blu-Ray and other video players do not have Ogg chips in them. Ogg chips do not exist.

A key feature of MPEG-4 is that it is the standardization of the Apple QuickTime file format, which is the basis of audio and video production. All the professional audio video tools could already “speak” QuickTime, so it was easy to upgrade tools from proprietary QuickTime to standardized MPEG-4. This was 10 years ago, by the way. It would have required massive development by tool vendors to support Ogg instead, and it would probably still not be implemented.

Ogg is the proprietary Linux video format. I know that sounds strange, “proprietary Linux” but that is true. Ogg is to Linux as WMV is to Windows. Neither format has anything to do with people outside of those 2 platforms, and no presence at all among people who make audio and video. Neither format has the toolchain that is required. It’s not suitable for anything other than hobbyist video, where you know you can play the weird format, and where losing a ton of disk space over MPEG-4 is not that big a problem. If you are shipping 1 million views of a video, the fact that MPEG-4 saves you 75% of the bandwidth compared to Ogg truly matters, the fact that people have MPEG-4 players and not Ogg truly matters.

The worst thing with people pushing Ogg is that they are just shooting their mouths off. You should have written code more than 10 years ago to make Ogg have the features it would require to be the consumer video format. If you didn’t do that, then STFU.

> DailyMotion was among the first major sites to implement HTML5 Video.
> And in Theora at that. Not Apple.

WTF is DailyMotion? Is it a Fortune 500 company? Does it have a market cap bigger than Google? Is it the biggest distributor of video downloads on the Internet? That is Apple.

> Apple doesn’t implement Theora because they have their own agenda to push.
> MPEG4/h.264.
> Google does not have such limits.

That is so outrageously absurd. Google owns YouTube, which is done entirely in MPEG-4 H.264. No matter what format you upload your video in, YouTube converts it to H.264 and that is the master copy. Google did a study of the feasibility of moving YouTube to Ogg, and they found that the Internet does not have the bandwidth for an Ogg YouTube, even if every other website went dark.

YouTube is now porting their HTML5/MPEG-4 mobile site to the desktop, so soon enough you will not need to burden your CPU and battery with FlashPlayer to see YouTube. Unless you are using Firefox.

Chrome also supports MPEG-4 video natively, same as Safari.

The reason Google is behind MPEG-4, same as Apple, is that both have a strong professional video presence and need to use the best tools. They can’t get away with using 10-years-out-of-date Ogg to make Linux philosophers happy.

> It definitely is an interesting battle between the Mozilla’s Gecko
> Engine and Apple’s Webkit Framework.

It is not a battle. Both development teams are implementing the same standard: HTML5. Both development teams share information and make each other better. Having 2 open source implementations of an HTML5 rendering engine is better than 1.

Apple created the canvas tag for the Mac OS Dashboard, and offered it for standardization in HTML5. Mozilla suggested a number of changes to the canvas tag to make it work cross-platform and make it more appropriate for universal standardization. Then Mozilla implemented the standardized version, and Apple went into WebKit and also implemented the standardized version. In other words, Apple changed their own fully-functional canvas implementation to match the standard. They likely had to modify Dashboard as well as other OS X components because WebKit is not just the engine for Safari, it’s the engine for OS X.

> H.264 is not an open standard

That is completely and categorically untrue.

H.264 is ISO/IEC 14496-10, it is part of MPEG-4, it is the successor to the MPEG-2 video that is used on DVD, and the MPEG-1 from CD-ROM. MPEG-4 H.264 is the video on Blu-Ray disc and YouTube, not just iTunes and iPod. H.264 is what you make with your Flip camcorder. H.264 is not just ideal for playback in QuickTime Player, it is also ideal for playback in Adobe FlashPlayer.

H.264 is not proprietary to Apple, and neither is MPEG-4, which is an open standardization of Apple’s QuickTime file format. If Apple wants to push proprietary video, they are actually one of the few who could do it, but when you buy from iTunes, you don’t get a QuickTime file, you get an MPEG-4 file. Apple delayed video in iTunes until they could ship standard media.

The thing you have to understand is that HTML5 is a standardization of Web markup, the Web’s publishing language. Markup is the code in a Web page, not the code in a video file. HTML5 is not a standardization of audio video … consumer audio video is standardized by MPEG for 20 years now. HTML5 deals with the video TAG, not the video file format. People who make video don’t care what the W3C thinks about video formats, they care what MPEG thinks. They don’t care what plays in Linux, they care what plays everywhere. Not even Microsoft could defeat audio video standardization, because the music industry has killed itself a few times with competing formats and nobody wants to do that again. Audio and video is much older than the Web, and the Web is very new to it. Some humility is in order.

What makes it worse to say that HTML5 should dictate video formats is that Web standardization has almost always been a complete failure. HTML4 was forked between IE and the other browsers, HTML3 was forked between Netscape and other browsers. On the other hand, audio video standardization has always been a success, with the exception of Microsoft’s HD-DVD creating consumer confusion for a brief time, but it had very little impact other than that.

The idea that a developer would go out of their way to standardize their markup but use non-standard video is truly outrageous. What is the point of that?

Right now MPEG-4 H.264/AAC plays in both QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer, both iTunes and YouTube, Blu-Ray, iPods and other media players, iPhone and Android and other smartphones, Safari and Chrome, and hundreds of other players from hundreds of manufacturers. You can make MPEG-4 H.264/AAC with a Flip or Kodak or iPhone camcorder, you can edit it with Final Cut or Avid and many other tools. You can watch it with various set-top boxes like Roku or AppleTV or the ones you get from cable companies. We are in the golden age of digital audio video because a lot of people did a lot of work over the past 10 years to make it that way. As a consumer of video, you get all of this for free because it’s supported by a small charge on the encoder that is built-into all of these devices. As a producer of video, you can get an encoder for $29. Before Adobe adopted MPEG-4 in FlashPlayer, they used their own proprietary FLV format, for which the encoder is $599, and which has much larger bandwidth requirements and lesser quality.

So if you are anti-MPEG-4, you should literally sell any of the above devices or players and stop participating in consumer video. Whining that the world is not using your precious Linux format is as bad as Microsoft pushing WMV on the world, or pushing MSHTML on the world.

At the very least, do some reading before you shoot your mouth off. Find out WTF time it is in digital audio video. The Ogg versus MPEG-4 debate literally happened in 2000. The fact that Web browsers are only catching up now is no excuse to to act like the last 10 years did not happen.

Works fine in IE 6, and the controls look identical to those via Chrome.

go figure?

Stopped reading there.