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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google has rolled out plans to drop the Ogg Theora video codec from its Chrome web browser [google.com] starting M123. The removal of that open standard for video will trickle down through Chromium and its derivatives.

Chrome will deprecate and remove support for the Theora video codec [wikipedia.org] in desktop Chrome due to emerging security risks. Theora's low (and now often incorrect) usage no longer justifies support for most users.

Notes:
- Zero day attacks against media codecs have spiked.
- Usage has fallen below measurable levels in UKM.
- The sites we manually inspected before levels dropped off were incorrectly preferring Theora over more modern codecs like VP9.
- It's never been supported by Safari or Chrome on Android.
- An ogv.js polyfill exists for the sites that still need Theora support.
- We are not removing support for ogg containers.

Our plan is to begin escalating experiments turning down Theora support in M120. During this time users can reactivate Theora support via chrome://flags/#theora-video-codec if needed.

The tentative timeline for this is (assuming everything goes smoothly):
- ~Oct 23, 2023: begin 50/50 canary dev experiments.
- ~Nov 1-6, 2023: begin 50/50 beta experiments.
- ~Dec 6, 2023: begin 1% stable experiments.
- ~Jan 8, 2024: begin 50% stable experiments.
- ~Jan 16th, 2024: launch at 100%.
- ~Feb 2024: remove code and chrome://flag in M123.
- ~Mar 2024: Chrome 123 will roll to stable.

Google is going with unstable and insecure WebP [mitre.org]. In contrast, Ogg Theora is both patent-free and mature. The last CVE for Theora was in 2011 [mitre.org]. Any word as to which patents affect WebP?

Original Submission