The war between Google and Microsoft is clearly heating up.
After being accused of copying Google’s search results on Tuesday, Microsoft is now going after Google, accusing it of injecting inconsistency and legal uncertainty into the Web video arena bynatively supporting only the newly open-sourced WebM video format in its Chrome browser, rather than the H.264 format preferred by Microsoft and Apple.
In response, Microsoft said it will build a Chrome plug-in that will restore support for H.264, an older and more commonly used video format. Microsoft said it plans to support H.264 in the next version of Internet Explorer, although it will also allow plug-ins that enable WebM support.
“Our point of view is totally clear,” Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch writes in a blog post being posted on Wednesday. “Our support for H.264 results from our views about a robust web and video ecosystem that provides a rich level of functionality, is the product of an open standards process like the W3C’s HTML5 specification, and has been free from legal attacks. Microsoft is agnostic and impartial about the actual underlying video format for HTML5 video as long as this freedom continues.” Read more
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