Posted on 01/29/2015 8:07:56 AM PST by CedarDave
Adobe Systems' Flash software had a good long run as the technology of choice for bringing interactive splash to the Web, but Google is helping to give it the heave-ho by moving YouTube to Web-standard video instead.
"We're now defaulting to the HTML5 player on the Web," said YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider in a blog post Tuesday. It took four years for Google to make the HTML5 change, which is a major victory for Web standards fans who've strived to eject proprietary plug-ins from the Web.
If you watched a video online 10 years or so, ago, it was almost certainly delivered with Flash. That's because Flash gave people an easy way to publish and share video in a way everyone could access -- similar to what Adobe did with its PDF file format and Acrobat document creation tool. That was during a period of relatively slow change for the Web, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market but remained static for years. Adobe acquired Flash's creator, Macromedia, for $3.4 billion in 2005.
Many of Flash's detractors, however, didn't want technology that's owned and controlled by a single company. Its most vocal opponent was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who publicly castigated Flash. "We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers," he famously wrote in blog post in April 2010. But while Jobs was the technology's best-known detractor, he wasn't alone.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
Thanks to both of you for your help. I’ve pretty much learned what websites to not bother with. When they offer videos of things that interest me, I do a YouTube search and if it’s there, I’ll open it. But, Adobe Flash and I have parted ways forever. (I never liked their Acrobat garbage either.)
Old PCs need to user a newer browser for this to work. Microsoft is phasing out support for all versions of IE prior to 11 in a push to make HTML5 a web standard for all platforms.
Adobe can jump in the lake...anything that unhooks us from their broken updating and popup reminders is good good news.
A lot of times videos a website presents to you are actually on youtube. Embedding youtube videos is convenient, reduces your storage costs, and your bandwidth costs.
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