YouTube Ditches Flash Now Default’s To HTML5 Player

After almost 5 years when Steve Jobs published his infamous "Thoughts on Flash," streaming video service YouTube has announced plans to migrate away from the technology as users accessing the site with HTML5 video player by default. YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider detailed the company's reasoning in a post to the official YouTube Engineering blog. It represents the culmination of 4 years of work, and was enabled by several recent additions to the HTML5 video specification. MediaSource Extensions allowed YouTube to provide adaptive bitrate streaming, which provides a mechanism for adjusting the quality of the video stream based on the throughput of the user's internet connection. Encrypted Media Extensions provide a framework for layering digital rights management into a standard HTML5 video player, and have also spurred adoption of the standard by companies like Netflix. Adobe has also faced numerous security problems with Flash. Most recently, the company acknowledgeda critical vulnerability in the Flash player that could allow an attacker to take over users' computers simply by directing them to a website.