I suspect they think forcing open standards is in the best long term interests of users, much the same way Apple has chosen to support HTML5 by shunning Flash.
Also, keep in mind that use of the HTML5 <video> tag is quite limited at the moment. The impact is quite minimal.
If Google didn't make a move like this, WebM might not take off the way it needs to to challenge the closed alternatives.
Firefox has got some kind of auto-installer for Flash (and notifies you if it needs updated, for security reasons).
They got accused of the same hypocrisy when they announced a royalty-free codec only strategy. They had some good responses, that I can't find right now but boiled down to "WebM is a fight we can win, removing or banning Flash is suicide".
Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years — if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges. Theoretically that plugin repository mechanism is crossplatform, and on some Linux platforms it can install a mplayer plugin, but it's purpose-designed for Flash and I'm not sure there are any other plugins for Windows in the repo that Mozilla hosts.
When they first implemented it, they also got a special license from Adobe to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days.
I guess I was assuming that the request was to remove flash entirely and prohibit its addition through plugins. If the question is bundle versus don't bundle, my answer is confusion at the difference in end result. It's not an apples to apples comparison because not bundling H.264 is essentially the same as making it entirely unavailable.
> With Chrome(ium) you can just replace the copy of the libavcodec dll/so, and it magically supports whatever codecs the new one is built with.
Yes, that is exactly what every non-technical user is going to do to get HTML5 video working properly in Chrome. If there was a button that popped up saying "Get the h.264 codec for Chrome" whenever there was the possibility of using it, then we'd have a comparison, but I doubt replacing shared libraries underneath Chrome is ever going to be a supported mode of extension.
It's what linux distributions have been doing by default — just replacing it with a symlink to the system's installation of ffmpeg. The sane ones take the added step of not crippling their default ffmpeg :)
Unlike Firefox, Chrome extensions are sandboxed, so they can't automatically replace the file for you. Someone can just make a simple native installer to do so though.
Still, the tide appears to have turned, so the usefulness of restoring h.264 <video> support may decline within a year. People outside the Mac world will probably just standardize on a Flash video player instead of trying to support multiple playback frontends.
Also, keep in mind that use of the HTML5 <video> tag is quite limited at the moment. The impact is quite minimal.
If Google didn't make a move like this, WebM might not take off the way it needs to to challenge the closed alternatives.