Even as early as January of this year, YouTube has renounced their use of Adobe Flash player in favor to HTML5 and Facebook has been viciously criticizing its weak defenses for a while now. “You’ll notice the new HTML interface immediately but the underlying video player will still be Flash”. The highly popular video streaming platform has announced that it has started making the transition towards adopting a more stable and secure video player. “As previously mentioned, this is a gradual roll out”, wrote Georgia Price on the official Twitch blog.
Advertisement
According to a Twitch staff member posting to Reeddit, the unoptimised version of the HTML5 player uses a third of the CPU and memory than the current Flash player does.
The move today is only for the player part of the equation, but a full HTML5 solution should be forthcoming. “The problem is that we do EVERYTHING in Flash right now, so we have to port every feature one-by-one into HTML/JS before we can release the player”. There’s only so much they can take, so after a while, it’s time to let go and move on.
With so many sites moving away from Flash, it remains to be seen if Adobe will be able to make a comeback and restore the Internet’s trust in its product.
“With Flash Player and AIR 19, we have introduced two new APIs for element insertion or removal in Vector and Arrays”. It wouldn’t surprise me if they rolled out HTML5 video on some of their bigger channels first to test before releasing it to the masses.
Advertisement
Getting the user interface working in HTML5 has been the first priority, and with that now being implemented, work will begin on shifting the video stream to the format. Flash is a notorious resource hog.
