Swish goes the axe as it descends to lob off another part of the diseased Adobe Flash. Facebook recently announced that every video you see on its website now plays in HTML5 by default and across all browsers since HTML 5 offers benefits that are suited to Facebook’s size and needs. Plus you know, it’s more secure.
Adobe itself recently acknowledged that it’s time to leave Flash behind, and back in July, Facebook’s security chief called for the Flash creator to announce an end-of-life date for the technology which, thanks to oft-discovered vulnerabilities, is a constant target of malicious software.
Facebook’s Daniel Baulig took to a post to explain why the social media giant has officially killed Flash on their website.
“We recently switched to HTML5 from a Flash-based video player for all Facebook web video surfaces, including videos in News Feed, on Pages, and in the Facebook embedded video player. We are continuing to work together with Adobe to deliver a reliable and secure Flash experience for games on our platform, but have shipped the change for video to all browsers by default. From development velocity to accessibility features, HTML5 offers a lot of benefits. Moving to HTML5 best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs.”
– Daniel Baulig, front-end engineer at Facebook.
Daniel also reports that after the switch there have been less bug reports and an increase in likes, comments and shares by users. According to him, people appear to be spending more time interacting with videos on Facebook after the switch.
Slightly more technical, the switch to HTML 5 also made development far more easier by allowing employees at Facebook to tap into the excellent tooling that exists in browsers, among the open source community, and at Facebook in general. Not having to recompile code and being able to apply changes directly in the browser allow developers to move much faster as opposed to Flash.
However some bugs were noted after the switch, most noticeable of all was that there was significantly worse performance in older browsers.
Source: Facebook.
