Facebook has finally made a huge move in a bid to completely ditch Adobe Flash for HTML5. The social network recently switched to the growing media platform, and even older web browsers will be supported.
Every video on Facebook will be HTML5-supported as the company moves one step closer to removing Flash from the social network for good. As it stands right now, only games will have support for Flash, but we expect that soon enough, all games will switch over to the new platform.
One of the reasons for Facebook's move has much do to with the platform's continuous security risks, an issue that never gets solved. This can be both a problem for Facebook and users of its network.
At first, Facebook rolled out HTML5 to only a small number of web browsers to test it out. At the moment, everyone can get in on the action and experience a close to Flash-less experience on the social network.
"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," according to Facebook's Daniel Baulig in a blog post.
We have been witnessing this move for quite some time with several Facebook videos watched with Mozilla Firefox as the browser.
The benefits of using HTML5:
By going this route, Facebook is making the social network more secure. Furthermore, watching videos should be smoother than before, especially for folks using older computers.
The default Facebook video player should now be available across all the main mobile platforms since they all support HTML5 in more ways than one.
As time goes by, more companies will put Adobe Flash on the backburner and move to HTML5. The platform only needs to become more mature to the point where it can compete with Flash in all the important areas. Until then, we can only sit back and wait.
Photo: Michael Pollak | Flickr
