In May, Google revealed it was planning to finish defining VP9 on June 17, after which it would start using the technology in Chrome and on YouTube. On that day, the company enabled the free video compression standard by default in the latest Chromium build, and now it has arrived in the latest Chrome build.
VP9 is the successor to VP8, both of which fall under Google’s WebM project of freeing Web codecs from royalty constraints. Despite the fact that Google unveiled WebM three years ago at its I/O conference, VP8 is still rarely used when compared to H.264, today’s most popular video codec.