“Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content.” These were Steve Jobs words in 2010 in his blog post on Apple’s website titled, Thoughts on Flash. When you consider the fact that in 2010, according to Adobe, 98% of internet enabled desktops worldwide had Flash player installed on them, Jobs words seemed farfetched. It doesn’t seem that way now that Youtube has dropped Flash and adopted HTML5 as the default video player on Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8 and FireFox Betas.The announcement was made on the Youtube engineering blog.
Advances made in the development of HTML5 over the past four years have led to the transition. According to the Youtube blog post, the benefits of the move extend beyond web browsers to smart TVs and other streaming devices. HTML5 now supports technologies like Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming which enables the player to switch between different encoding settings based on the system resources available; this results in less buffering and a good experience for high-end and low-end connections.
HTML5 also takes advantage of the open VP9 codec, which gives higher quality video resolution with an average bandwidth reduction of 35 percent. WebRTC, another feature that HTML5 supports, also allows Youtube provide broadcasting tools from within the browser.
With the recent move by Youtube, the largest source of web based videos; it is safe to say that the days of Flash are more or less over. Good bye Flash.
