It's now around $300 million a year.

For HTML5 video IE9 only allows H.264 and WebM regardless of whatever other codecs are installed. Originally it was H.264 only. Then, after Google's announcement and release of WebM, it became H.264 and WebM. Microsoft cites security, consistency and legal concerns as their primary reasons for restricting the number of codecs available for HTML5 video. Here are some posts from the IE blog which chart the changes:

H.264 announced as the only supported HTML5 video codec: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx
Explanation of exclusion of other codecs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx
WebM support announced: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx
Video format support demo published, only interesting as a convenient test page for WebM in IE: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/16/html5-video-update-webm-for-ie9.aspx

It's a shame that Microsoft hasn't joined the WebM CCL yet. Dean Hachamovitch (corporate vice president for IE) called for the creation of such a body, it was created, and Microsoft still haven't joined for some reason. As far as I know they haven't yet said why they won't join.

No, the only codecs supported by IE9 are WebM and H.264. You can, however, shoehorn Theora support into IE with an Active X control:

http://cristianadam.blogspot.com/2011/01/activex-controls.html

Internet Explorer 9 supports both H.264 and WebM. No other video codecs are supported by IE9. WebM support is added by installing the media foundation components:

http://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf/

You can test WebM support in IE9 with Microsoft's IE9 test drive video support demo:

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/videoformatsupport/default.html

The hard part is making that happen in the first place. From the article:

Leaving aside the possibility of people acquiring the video without paying for it, he had $300,000 of costs (they don't indicate where the other $100,000 went, maybe the $202,000 figure mentioned was the up front cost and the next $98,000 was distribution). Sure, he could have perhaps found a lower cost way to distribute it but it's still $170,000 in production costs. Part of the deal with publishers of any kind is that they're taking on the risk of producing it. If it doesn't sell it's them who will be losing money, not the author or act or band, etc. In this case, Louis CK put himself in a position where he would potentially lose $170,000 at the minimum. It's only established acts who have the opportunity to take that sort of risk.

Initially you said "I'm not seeing how they are trying to push developers away from W3C standards" and now you agree that the audio and video formats that Apple deem suitable for the Web are incompatible with W3C standards. Good. We are in agreement. As I said and as you now agree, it would be nice if Apple showed more commitment to an open web.

Yes, they really do. Please, this is beyond tedious. Here is the W3C's patent policy:

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/

Have a read. Note that the W3C insists on standards that can be implemented on a royalty-free basis. Anything that does not meet that test cannot be considered a web standard.

Sorry, but that's precisely what you're doing. There's no value in arguing semantics here. In the context of the Web when someone describes something as being "open" they always mean both open and royalty-free. I know that's what they mean. You know that's what they mean. We all know that's what they mean.

TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, JPG, PNG and now even GIF are all both open and royalty-free. There's nothing so special about audio and video that they can't be the same and the troubled history of GIF is the only cautionary tale required. The MPEG LA could contribute to a better Web tomorrow by making H.264 royalty-free but they won't. They are only interested in the Web insofar as it offers them profit by the proliferation of formats they manage the license for. That kind of mentality is bad for everyone on the Web.

One example is that Apple doesn't support open, royalty-free video and audio formats in Safari out of the box. This is quite amusing given that Siri uses Ogg Speex. It'd be nice if Apple showed more commitment to an open web. Even if Apple is still scared of WebM, there's no reason in the world why Safari couldn't have Ogg Vorbis support by default on the desktop and in iOS.

No. Chrome can't out-Firefox Firefox because it never has been and never will be what Firefox is. Firefox exists to promote the interests of Web users. Chrome, in contrast, exists to promote the interests of Google.

Corporations are only useful insofar as their interests coincide with your own. With Chrome, Google will decide that its interests trump the end user's. A simple example is Chrome's new in-browser advertising. In-browser advertising is only useful to Google and is utterly useless to me as a Web user. I prefer not to use adware so I don't use Chrome.

There have been many features added between 6 and 10. If you want to know what those features are, look at the feature tracking pages: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking/Archives The two features I'm particularly looking forward to are type inference in Firefox 9 and OpenGL acceleration in Firefox Mobile 10.

It was bundled with Skype updates a while back. I don't know if it still is. Adobe bundled it with Adobe Reader recently. I'd be interested to know how much of Chrome's growth can be attributed to deliberate and inadvertent installation when it gets delivered with other, perhaps more popular, software like Skype and Reader.

Astronomical.