Google Offers WebM Plug-in for IE9
Apparently, two can play at that game. When Google announced that it was pulling H.264 video support from its Chrome browser, Microsoft created a Chrome plug-in that adds H.264 support. Now, Google has returned the favor. While the just-released Internet Explorer 9 only natively supports H.264 for HTML5 video, Google has now created an IE plug-in that lets Microsoft's browser play WebM streams.
Interested IE9 users can download the plug-in here. It works on Windows7 and Vista systems.
Internet Explorer 9 was released earlier this week, and is the first version of IE to support the HTML5 video tag.
Microsoft had already created a plug in that brings H.264 support to the Firefox browser.
Google's move was apparently no surprise to Microsoft. Writing on the IE blog last month, Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, wrote, "We will provide support for IE9 users who install third-party WebM video support on Windows and they will be able to play WebM video in IE9."
"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," wrote Hachamovitch.
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