[acdha]

Google should support H.264 as well. The quality is close to VP9 (i.e. most users won’t notice a difference) and the hardware acceleration makes a huge difference on all but the latest systems. Saving a little bandwidth at the expense of going from 10% to 100+% CPU is a net loss, especially for battery powered devices.

[vetinari]

Systems from last few years have VP9 encoding too, only AMD is a laggard in this regard (Raven Ridge is the first GPU to support it).

And while we are talking about hardware, it would be nice, if both Chrome and Firefox supported hw accelerated decoding on Linux. Currently, they don't support it at all.

[acdha]

Yes, it’s appearing but it’s not anywhere near a given, especially on corporate and non-gamer systems — exactly the majority of users who don’t care about bandwidth if it means their CPU fans are on high driving a slideshow.