Man, seems like just last week I downloaded Chrome 11. Oh wait it was. Is Google’s accelerated cycling through version numbers necessary? Who cares, as long as they continue making a fast and functional web browser.
Google Chrome Canary About To Hit OS X — Chrome 16 Due Before End Of Year
While this would only be used in certain situations, and have specialized utility, I can still see it coming in handy.
This is a definite step back for one of the promises of HTML5 — the simple video tag. Now if both Firefox and now Chrome aren’t supporting H.264, it really hinders the usability of HTML5′s no-plugin required video tag. Google has pledged in future versions to only suport ts own WebM codec, and Theora. Is it me, or does this feel like they’re just trying to spite Apple?
Google’s Dropping H.264 From Chrome a Step Backward for Openness
Edit: here’s a more biased opinion on Google’s announcement on dropping H.264 support, but still worth reading and they make some very valid points:
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish
Web designers and front-end developers have always clashed when it comes to fonts. The list of web-safe fonts is very short, and some aren’t real usable in many situations — Comic Sans MS, I’m looking at you!
There have been some attempts of introducing fonts via Flash or images, but neither are completely accessible or the end-all-be-all of search engine optimization. Today, Google offered up their solution. Time will tell how effective, usable and used it will become. The one stumbling block I see — at least initially is the fact that it utilizes all open-source fonts. But then again, more universally web-usable fonts for a designer to utilize should help regardless.
