Reported by TheVerge, it seems that Youtube has finally made HTML5 the default platform for playing videos. For the longest time however Flash was the reigning champion and the HTML5 player was in beta however. It’s been quite some time in beta if I remember correctly. However times have now changed as the Youtube HTML5 player will be the default for just about every browser; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.
As with the permanent move to HTML5 comes several improvements to the Youtube player; MediaSource Extensions, VP9 video codec, Encrypted Media Extensions and Common Encryption, WebRTC. All of which you can get an idea on these improvements and features by reading up on the Youtube Engineering and Developer blog.
The good thing about this is that now just about every mobile device can access and play videos natively vs being required to use an app. At the same time this has the slow death that Flash been suffering ever since iOS and Android abandoned the platform has now been hastened. Now that’s not to say that the Flash player has been removed, for obvious reasons such as older browser capability in the event it doesn’t support HTML5. For everyone else there simply will be no reason to switch back to Flash. I’ve been using the HTML5 player for quite some time, I’m sure we all have and I’m sure we’ll all in agreement that we aren’t going back.
So long Flash, you did us all well but it’s just time to move on, you know… for science!
