> In 2010... the majority of video playback devices were already smartphones

I find this extremely difficult to believe. In 2010 the only widely used smartphone would have been the iPhone. The Motorola Droid was the first widely marketed Android device in the US and was only launched in late 2009.

The full context, to avoid confusion: "because no major browser supported it back then and the majority of video playback devices were already smartphones (without vp8 decoding capabilities)"

No major browsers didn't support VP8 back then, and among the remaining devices (other appliances than PCs with those Browsers) the majority of video playback devices were already smartphones (not supporting VP8 in 2010).

Apologies for the lack of clarity.

Wrong. Google aggressively enabled VP8 on YouTube even when there was very little hardware decode. Saved a few megabits per stream on their side, nuked everyone's battery but hey Google didn't give a hoot because that was an externalized cost.

It's why the h264ify extension existed, and forced h264 was for that time a large part of the reason Safari had vastly superior battery life.

"Wrong!"

Chrome didn't support VP8 until the first stable release in September 2010, others browsers added it in 2011.

They can be as aggressive as they want, when opening a video the client/server agreed on a codec both support and in 2010 that codec wasn't VP8

You can choose to believe what you want, in reality Google decided to nuke people their battery for fringe benefit to themselves. They flipped the switch way ahead of broad hardware decode support.