Controversies
Controversies surrounding the H.264 video compression standard stem primarily from its use within the HTML5 Internet standard. HTML5 adds two new tags to the HTML standard: and for direct embedding of video and audio content into a web page. HTML5 is being developed by the HTML5 working group as an open standard to be adopted by all web browser developers. In 2009, the HTML5 working group was split between supporters of Ogg Theora, a free video format whose developers believe is unencumbered by patents, and H.264, which contains patented technology. As late as July 2009, Google and Apple were said to support H.264, while Mozilla and Opera support Ogg Theora. Microsoft, with the release of Internet Explorer 9, has added support for both HTML 5 and H.264. At the Gartner Symposium/ITXpo in November, 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer answered the question "HTML 5 or Silverlight?" by saying "If you want to do something that is universal, there is no question the world is going HTML5." In January 2011, Google announced that they were pulling support for H.264 from their Chrome browser and supporting both Theora and WebM/VP8 to use only open formats. However, as of September 2012, Google has not followed through with this announcement and still supports H.264 in their Chrome browser through FFMPEG. No official statement was released on the matter.
On 18 March 2012, Mozilla announced support for H.264 in Firefox on mobile devices, due to prevalence of H.264-encoded video and the increased power-efficiency of using dedicated H.264 decoder hardware common on such devices.