Facebook Abandons Flash in Favor of HTML5
Facebook has put another nail in the coffin of Flash by announcing that all videos on its site now run in HTML5 by default in nearly all browsers. The social network first began experimenting with HTML5 video five years ago, but it has taken some time for the site to transition away from Flash. "In theory, most browsers in use support HTML5 video. However, in practice we noticed that a lot of the older browsers would simply perform worse using the HTML5 player than they had with the old Flash player. We saw more errors, longer loading times, and a generally worse experience," Facebook engineer Daniel Baulig explained. "That's why we waited until recently to ship the HTML5 player to all browsers by default, with the exception of a small set of them."
Adobe has also recently announced that it is transitioning away from flash, which has encouraged many Web developers to migrate to HTML5 instead.