YouTube’s Engineering and Developer’s blog:
> Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5
>
> Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5
YouTube was one of the first major supporters of Flash and one of the last to move on. Flash is not supported at all on iOS. As to Android, there’s this from Adobe’s Flash Player Help document:
> Adobe Flash Player is no longer available in Google Play Store for downloading. However, Android users can download and install Flash Player from the Archived Flash Player versions page. This document provides the steps on manually installing Flash Player on Android devices.
And now, the Flash team must be thinking, “Et tu, YouTube?”
I use ClickToPlugin plugin in Safari. Mostly just to stop Flash from autoplaying. Added bonus – Youtube plays pure HTML5 video, which means no prerolls and ads on video. (It also means no overlay texts and buttons on video)
That certainly explains the improvement in streaming video at YouTube. Too bad they’re being such jerks to independent musicians.
I recently got rid of Flash on my Mac, and I am surprised at the number of sites that seem to require that desktop browsers use Flash, when the same sites work fine on my iPad. It’s a real pain to switch User Agent to Safari/iPad just to watch Daily Show clips.
Seems like bad site coding to me.
On the good side, Facebook videos won’t load on the desktop without Flash. So that’s a plus!
Preroll ads and overlays for HTML5 video already exist. Maybe you’re using some sort of ad blocker because YouTube has to make money somehow so they still use preroll ads.
With this method there are no prerolls and overlays. I don’t use adblock.