Speaking as someone who works for a browser vendor: There's a big difference between dropping support for entrenched technologies, and choosing which emerging technologies to support.
Certain formats and practices are already part of the web, for better or worse, and it's not fully within the browser vendors' power to change that. If any browser dropped Flash support, it would break thousands of popular web sites, and users would simply switch browsers.
What is within our power is to decide which emerging standards to support. Dropping H.264 in <video> at this point won't cause users to flee the browser. And it does give us some chance of avoiding another patent-encumbered format becoming a de-facto standard on the web.
We don't control existing sites, but we do control our own actions which influence new sites. We can't alter the past, but we can change the future.
That's true, which is why I referred specifically to H.264 in the <video> element (which is the only case affected by this change). There are mature implementations, but as a part of the web platform it is still in very early stages.
While H.264 <video> is already deployed widely thanks to iOS, it's generally with a fallback for the majority of users whose browsers don't support it. Removing it from Chrome will not break the web for users, in the way it would if they removed Flash or GIF or JavaScript semicolon insertion, or any other of the many web technologies we'd like to retroactively wish away.
Certain formats and practices are already part of the web, for better or worse, and it's not fully within the browser vendors' power to change that. If any browser dropped Flash support, it would break thousands of popular web sites, and users would simply switch browsers.
What is within our power is to decide which emerging standards to support. Dropping H.264 in <video> at this point won't cause users to flee the browser. And it does give us some chance of avoiding another patent-encumbered format becoming a de-facto standard on the web.
We don't control existing sites, but we do control our own actions which influence new sites. We can't alter the past, but we can change the future.