YouTube largely trades Flash for HTML5 video

YouTube is largely switching to HTML5 video. Only in old browsers, as well as the latest stable version of Firefox, the Flash player is still used; users of other browsers are presented with the new html5 player.

That applies to users of recent versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox, YouTube reports. Since the spring of 2014, YouTube has been using the HTML5 players in recent versions of Google Chrome. In 2010, YouTube owner Google didn’t think HTML5 video was ripe enough to replace Flash, but HTML5 video support has improved a lot in recent years.

This allowed for a flexible bitrate, which means that users don’t have to look at a buffer screen as often: videos then start playing in lower quality. It also became possible to encrypt videos for digital rights management, something that Firefox reluctantly implemented. YouTube is not the only video streaming service to switch to HTML5 video: Netflix has already partly done that. According to YouTube, the HTML5 video player offers a number of improvements, such as the vp9 video codec, which would reduce data consumption by as much as 35 percent compared to the Flash player.