YouTube Strikes A Needed Blow At Adobe Flash, Makes HTML5 Player Default

Hot on the heels of another severe Adobe Flash vulnerability (CVE-2015-0311) getting patched, YouTube has decided to flick the switch and turn its HTML5 player on by default. This follows a staggering five-year period from when the feature was first announced, and is an enormous change for a service that delivers videos to over 1 billion visitors each month.

To take best advantage of the HTML5 player, you’ll want to be using the most up-to-date version of your browser. I tested videos out using Internet Explorer 11, Firefox 35, Chrome 40, and even the brand-new Vivaldi browser, and they all worked beautifully.

If you’re unsure of whether or not your browser is running the proper version of the player, you can simply right-click it to see if it lists “About the HTML5 player” as an option. This is really the only way to verify, as to my recollection, this player looks absolutely identical to the Flash-based one.

Moving away from Flash isn’t the only benefit with this HTML5 player. With it, Google’s able to utilize its VP9 codec, which it says reduces video bandwidth by up to 35% without affecting the quality. What this means is, we should soon see support for video greater than 1080p to be made available at 60 FPS speeds.

YouTube’s HTML5 player has been a long time coming, and it’s great to see it finally rolled out on such a grand scale. Now it’s a matter of waiting for the rest of the Web to catch up.