Microsoft Reasserts Support for H.264, Releases Plug-In for Chrome

Microsoft VP of Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch has penned a detailed explanation of why Microsoft is supporting H.264 and his concerns over Google's withdrawn support.

Hachamovitch also announced the release of a H.264 plugin for Chrome.

Microsoft’s Point of View and Plan for IE9
As context for the questions below, here’s a re-cap of Microsoft’s point of view and plan for IE9.
● IE9 will play HTML5 video in the H.264 format. Why H.264? It is a high-quality and widely-used video format that serves the Web very well today. We describe many of those reasons in blog posts here, here, and here.
● Any browser running on Windows can play H.264 video via the built-in Windows APIs that support the format. Our point of view here is that Windows customers should be able to play mainstream video on the Web. We’ve provided Windows 7 customers who choose to run Mozilla Firefox an add-on to enable playing H.264 video on Web pages with the HTML5 video tag. Today we’re making available a similar plug-in for Google Chrome.
● IE9 users who install third-party WebM video support on Windows will be able to play WebM video in IE. We chose this path (supporting one additional video format that the user has installed on her machine) because we recognize that other video formats exist and we wanted to give customers a convenient way to view video in those other formats without specifying a particular one. With this approach, we provide a more stable platform overall given the many documented risks with arbitrarily downloaded video codecs including their use as vectors for malware and phishing.


Google dropping support for H.264 is widely seen as an attack against Apple. It effectively forces developers to use Flash to deliver video and only serves to hurt a user's browsing experience.

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