They did this during the period where Chrome was eating into Firefox usage, after telling Mozilla that they would drop H.264 in favor of open codecs but never keeping that promise. Here’s some period discussion:
What this meant in practice was that Firefox would play YouTube videos at close to 100% CPU and Chrome would use H.264 and play at like 5% CPU, and since it was VP8 the quality was noticeably worse than H.264 as well. Regular people talked about that a lot, and it helped establish Chrome’s reputation for being faster.
Unfortunately some 10 years later Google is still pretty much the same with regards to video codec understanding.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. If there was something outside of stupidity, zealotry would be another one. Although I guess one could argue zealotry is also a form of stupidity.
acdha|11 months ago
https://www.osnews.com/story/24263/google-h264-stifles-innov...
What this meant in practice was that Firefox would play YouTube videos at close to 100% CPU and Chrome would use H.264 and play at like 5% CPU, and since it was VP8 the quality was noticeably worse than H.264 as well. Regular people talked about that a lot, and it helped establish Chrome’s reputation for being faster.
ksec|11 months ago
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. If there was something outside of stupidity, zealotry would be another one. Although I guess one could argue zealotry is also a form of stupidity.
izacus|11 months ago
It's been a long time since I've seen a VP8 video on YT, so I'd assume it's not even used anymore due to worse compression.