So Google, You’ll Be Dropping Support For Flash Next, Right?

Do you smell that? Just wait a second. You will.

Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

The bolding is mine, but that’s Google’s actual statement as to why they’re dropping support for the H.264 video codec from the Chromium open source browser (from which Chrome is built).

Erick wrote up the main story earlier today, but in my opinion, he didn’t go far enough in calling bullshit on this maneuver. Namely, how on Earth can Google get away with dropping support for one popular codec under the guise of “open” when baked into their browser is Flash, the decidedly un-open plug-in?

I’ve talked to Google a number of times about the Chrome/Flash issue over the past year. Namely because the only time Chrome ever fails or has performance issues is due to Flash. And because they bake it in, you have no choice but to live with it or manually disable it (which most users have no idea how to do, obviously). Anyway, Google’s stance is essentially that they bake it in for security and performance purposes.

Flash is a huge security risk in web browsers because flaws are not only found often but the patches take a lot time to matriculate to users — if they ever do. That’s because users are forced to install updates. Of course, that’s one big problem with being a plug-in in the first place rather than a standard part of the browser itself. So Google thought they could solve this problem just auto-updating Flash within Chrome.

And that’s all well and good. I don’t like getting Flash installed by default because of the performance issues, but I agree that this helps the vulnerability issues. The problem is that Google’s stated stance is now that they’re all about enabling “open innovation” by removing non-open technologies like H.264. That’s fine too. But you can’t be hypocritical, Google. Remove Flash too if that’s your real stance.

Read more: Techcrunch

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