Google Chrome Dev Channel Gets VP8 WebM Support

If you have followed the development of web browsers in the past months you probably noticed that a fight for the HTML5 video format broke out between big players.

Both Microsoft and Apple support h.264 while Opera and Mozilla suppor OGG Vorbis while Google supports both for now in its Chrome browser.

This would have been disastrous not only for end users who would run into video playback troubles if they used the wrong browser on a site but also webmasters who wanted to provide access to HTML5 video as they needed to make sure to support both standards for compatibility reasons (so that their visitors did not run into troubles).

A third contender was introduced by Google soon thereafter. VP8/WebM quickly became a possible solution for HTML5 video as four of the five major browser developers announced support for the standard (Apple is the remaining company that did not).

The first WebM supporting browsers were Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Chromium. The Google Chrome dev channel update as of today adds support for VP8/WebM to this version of Google Chrome as well.

Dev channel releases are for testers and administrators mainly as they often contain code that is not yet ready for stable public releases. These builds are used to test features, see how they work for a wider test group and to tweak them to make them ready for the bulk of users.

It is likely that WebM support is added relatively quickly to the beta releases of Google Chrome and then eventually to the release versions that are available for the general public.

Google Chrome Dev can be downloaded from the Chromium website. VP8/WebM can be tested on YouTube and other sites. Read the instructions offered by our WebM video guide to find out more about that.

The developers have also fixed a general crash reason when changing networks or waking from sleep and issues in the Mac and Linux builds of the web browser.

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