In an ideal world, Apple and Microsoft would support Vorbis and Opus natively
in their browsers for audio, but they don't. It sucks because there are a
huge percentage of users that use their browsers on the desktop and on
mobile/tablet devices. At least Android supports Ogg and WebM natively in the
OS and their default browsers.
Why do they only include AAC and MP3 instead? Maybe since both have ties to
the organizations. Still, both Vorbis and Opus are patent and royalty free
and get ignored. Its worse when the mobile market is controlled by major
corporations who push non-free components and consumers buy them blindly.
As of the recent versions, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera support the VP9 and
Opus codec in the WebM container. I know that Firefox has supported .opus
files directly for a while, but not 100% about Chrome.
WebRTC may be the way to go for native communication in the browser and
hopefully VP9 or Daala get standardized for video and Opus for audio. Of
course there will be pushback from Apple and Microsoft as they will STILL
push their patent laden multimedia codecs instead. :-(
