“ Since companies like Apple, Google and Nokia are already invested in H.264, the prospect of having to support an old obsolete codec is not at all desirable. Google has noted that there’s no way the company could serve up YouTube’s billions of streams using the much less efficient Ogg Theora codec, saying it would consume the world’s Internet bandwidth due to its less sophisticated compression. Ogg Theora also lacks the hardware acceleration available for H.264, making it completely unattractive for use in mobile devices from netbooks to smartphones. Opera and Mozilla don’t make mobile hardware, so they don’t care about this. Mozilla doesn’t even have a viable mobile browser. Opera’s mobile business largely centers on Opera Mini, which isn’t really a web browser but actually an applet that displays pre-rendered web pages served by Opera’s web proxy servers to less powerful phones that can’t run a real browser. All of the advanced new mobile devices use a WebKit-based browser, from Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch to the Palm Pre, BlackBerry Storm, and Google Android devices.
