Facebook Ditches Flash For It’s Videos

Flash player may now just fade away as even Facebook pulls out and switches to HTML5 video.

Flash player has slowly been diminishing from all major platforms and Facebook has finally pulled out, and that may just be the last straw in Flash’s slow death

Facebook has made HTML5 its default player for all the videos that are uploaded or viewed on the social network, which, simply means that every video that you post on your profile or every video that goes through your news feed need not require a Flash Player to play.

A video is considered ‘seen’ even if it just appears on your news feed while you are just scrolling through and start playing as you scroll through your feed on Facebook. Well that’s what TML5 does for you.

As per Daniel Baulig, an engineer at Facebook, “Not only did launching the HTML5 video player make development easier, but it also improved the video experience for people on Facebook, with videos now starting to play faster. People like, comment, and share more on videos after the switch, and users have been reporting fewer bugs. People appear to be spending more time with video because of it”.

There are nearly 8 billion videos viewed on Facebook every day and after YouTube having shifted to HTML5 plugin for viewing videos followed by Facebook, there are a very few websites left that support Flash Player plugin.

This means the majority of web video viewership is now Flash-free, which brings us to the conclusion that Flash is going to die out very soon unless of course, the company comes up with a brilliantly new idea.

Even Adobe has starting moving away from Flash after Facebook’s Head of Security, Alex Stamos instructed it on doing so, and recently Adobe did get rid of Flash from all of its creative tools.

So, Flash is literally dead for videos and adverts on Facebook although it still supports Flash based games such as Farmville which is a popular game on Facebook.

Firefox on the other hand had already had blocked Flash Player sometime back, however that was due to security reasons. The plugin was said to be over-exposed to hackers thus making browsing and watching videos a dangerous activity for people using Flash.
Firefox users who wish to view Flash based content are given a warning in the form of a pop-up on their screen warning them against using Flash as it is exposed to vulnerabilities. This means that Firefox users can no longer set up or use Flash as their default player.

On the same note, Apple Inc. has never favoured Flash in the first place, with their OS not supporting Flash for several years now, causing users to download third party patches, if they really were bent on using Flash, for some unfathomable reason.

At the end-user front, Facebook users won’t be facing much of a change other than the fact that now they will be able to view videos without even having to click on them and that they wouldn’t have to bother about security issues or their systems or data being at risk due to Flash, which is good in every way, good for Flash — of course, sure not. But, such is the switchblade of Technology.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.