YouTube now defaults to HTML5 <video>

YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog:

Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5 <video> tag and how it performed compared to Flash. At the time, there were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery. Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering.

Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 <video> by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.

Thanks Steve Jobs for really start the war against Adobe Flash. It’s a bug ridden extension full of security holes, and the sooner it disappears, the better. This will put another nail in the coffin.