I recently found a strange problem:

I tried looking at a youtube video, but it didn’t work.

After some experimentation, I found that it was partly due to youtube using HTML5, and partly due to firefox (chrome worked correctly, and firefox displayed other non-youtube HTML5 pages correctly).

So what gives?

And how do I fix it?

Well, it turns out that YouTube is using a proprietary codec to show these video… but only Chrome is “licensed” for this particular codec.

So its not Firefox’s “fault”… its google / YouTube who are “breaking” the HTML5 standard… Yeah, ok, technically, they are not breaking the standard, but using a proprietary codec is a good way of turning people away.

I hope this situation doesn’t start to mirror the weird GIF situation from many years ago.

If only Google would release this codec to the public (or use an existing codec), then we wouldn’t have this stupid situation.

Google: get your act together!