Makes sense that Cisco would be using CBP after seeing this on Wikipedia:
"this profile is most typically used in videoconferencing and mobile applications"
Yes, I can understand the encoder only supporting CBP - videoconferencing is the one thing that you really need encoding capabilities for in a browser. Anything else you can basically always encode offline and use x264 or whatever.
The real shortcoming is the fact that the decoder is also limited to CBP - as I said, this makes it completely useless for decoding most H.264 video out there (which is either Main or High Profile, generally the latter if we're talking HD content), web or otherwise.
While initially, members of the project seemed to be from the same Cisco family, it looks welcoming: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/blame/master/CONTRIBUTORS
Well, I wasn't expecting miracles from this, but constrained baseline profile only? That's very disappointing. Not only will this be unable to decode most of the H.264 content out there (web and otherwise), you could very likely get better results with VP8.
If only they'd have endorsed something like libavcodec instead...