YouTube makes HTML5 the default video standard

Photo from Flickr: Rego Korosi

Whether you loved it or hated it, Adobe's Flash is exiting the building. Security problems, battery drains and those wonderfully updates may have put it in the coffin, but YouTube is adding the nails. The iPhone famously never supported flash leaving only android until Adobe announced they were ending development for the os. 

YouTube has finally announced that HTML5 is now the default instead of flash. In a developer blog post, Engineering Manager Richard Leider made it official saying, "By providing an open standard platform, HTML5 has also enabled new classes of devices like Chromebooks and Chromecast."  This has been in the works for years, though you could use hacks or opt-in for testing before it became the default.

So what are the pros. By default Chrome, IE 11 ( I'm sure Project Spartan when available), Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox. Now if you're wondering why not Firefox stable and only betas, I'm sure they only said that because Firefox isn't ready out of the box yet. 

Some other benefits include:

MediaSource Extensions - Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) which will allow less buffering by more than 50 percent globally and as much as 80 percent on heavily congested networks, live streaming in game consoles like Xbox and PS4, on devices like Chromecast and in web browsers similar to twitch

VP9 video codec - start times will be 15-80 percent faster allowing higher video resolution with an average bandwidth reduction of 35 percent giving more people access to 4K and HD at 60FPS

WebRTC - enables plugin-free broadcasting tools from within the browser e.g. Google Hangouts technology

You can head over to the blog post to find out more about the API and benefits of HTML5.