In yet another milestone in the lengthy decline of Adobe Flash, Facebook has announced that every video on its website now plays in the alternative technology of HTML5 by default.
This is the case across almost all browsers capable of playing the videos – and, in a blog post, Facebook has said that this change “best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs.”
Though use of Flash has been in decline across the web for some time now, Facebook’s Daniel Baulig revealed in the blog post that his company had long resisted broadly expanding use of the newer standard of HTML5 for its videos due to struggles some older browsers faced in handling it.
“We decided to initially launch the HTML5 player to only a small set of browsers, and continuously roll out to more browsers, versions, and operating systems as we improved it and fixed small bugs,” Baulig, a Front End Engineer for the social media site, explained.
Facebook has not, however, abandoned its use of Flash across the entire site, Baulig having reported that “we are continuing to work together with Adobe to deliver a reliable and secure Flash experience for games on our platform”.