Let’s flash back to April 2010.
That was the month that Steve Jobs penned his famous “Thoughts on Flash” memo, in which he soundly rejected any and all reasons for Apple to adopt Flash on the iOS operating system.
Jobs famously said that Flash was too battery-hungry, too unreliable, too insecure, too slow and too closed to be a wise platform for the mobile-first developers of then-tomorrow. And people scoffed at the time.
But who’s laughing now?
Today, Google announced that YouTube is finally ditching Flash for HTML5 video by default.
“Other content providers like Netflix and Vimeo, as well as companies like Microsoft and Apple have embraced HTML5 and been key contributors to its success,” said Google, pointing out the obvious: Flash content has been on the decline for years.
Why? It’s pretty obvious. Flash content requires a native plugin, while HTML5 runs on pretty much any system out there. And anecdotally? Flash is a complete resource hog. In fact, after installing a simple Flash Blocker on my Chrome install the other day, the CPU usage of my browser went down an astonishing 80 percent.
Anyway, while you haven’t needed Flash to access YouTube for years, this is officially the turning of the tide: Even if you have Flash installed, Google will now play video on HTML5 if you’re accessing the site in Chrome, Microsoft’s IE11, Apple’s Safari 8 or a beta version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
Maybe now we can finally kill off Flash except for extreme legacy purposes, once and for all?
Source: VentureBeat
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
6 responses to “Steve Jobs was right: YouTube is finally HTML5-first”
Could someone please send the memo to Facebook..
I don’t like HTML5 Youtube because it makes a second screen useless when full-screening (like Vimeo etc.).
Finally, look forward to when I can uninstall Flash from my desktop computer as well. Adobe has neglected Flash ever since they bought it. And the few features they have added they usually try to charge money from. So, as steve jobs said, a too controlled system, and controlled by the wrong people.
But what about videos on other websites , what about them ? Is html5 being implemented there too ?
Extreme legacy cases? Like that video next to your post? Awkward…