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Facebook Replaces Flash With HTML5 For Videos (facebook.com) 76

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook announced that it officially replaced Flash with HTML5 for its video player. They made the change because of security reasons, but developers also found it easier to work with — it led to quicker turnarounds for site-wide changes, and had better integration with code testing platforms. Facebook reports that user engagement has gone up since the switch was made.
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Facebook Replaces Flash With HTML5 For Videos

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  • From what I recall, the whole point in joining Facebook is to play Farmville. Have they come out with an HTML5 version of Farmville yet?

  • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Monday December 21, 2015 @02:20AM (#51157187)

    Still a long way to go before we can be rid of the horrid thing, but this is one step closer.

    • by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Monday December 21, 2015 @02:29AM (#51157195)

      Same with facebook.

    • by Tsingi ( 870990 )

      Still a long way to go before we can be rid of the horrid thing, but this is one step closer.

      I haven't used it in ages. When I come to a site like the BBC that says something like "Your technology is out of date." If I feel charitable I write them and tell them to get their shit together. Regardless of whether I write them or not, I close the site.

  • Facebook (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Facebook and Google are organs of US intelligence and nobody should be using them.

    As a matter of fact, both of these firms probably save the NSA millions of dollars a year in intelligence analysis. Before FB and Google, link analysis was traditionally a very labor intensive, manual process performed by some snot-nosed twenty-something fresh out of Yale.

  • Where? When?

    Because my Facebook account still requires me to click-to-enable-plugin to view the videos.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    About damn time!

  • "user engagement has gone up"

    I searched the link for the word "engagement" to no avail. I still don't get it. Users are getting married more or they engage further in Facebook but how?

    • The real question is - has Facebook EVER made a change where they subsequently didn't claim that "user engagement has gone up"?

      • by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

        Facebook is heavily into A/B testing, so I imagine they've made many hundreds of changes by now where they didn't make that claim. For the changes that didn't pan out, they quietly roll them back and never mention them at all.

      • "user engagement has gone up" really means because flashblock doesn't work in HTML5, your data-plan gets hammered harder and our ad revenue has gone up.

    • That's what you get for not paying attention to the privacy-policy changes.

      You had 24 hours to uncheck "Will you marry Facebook, inc.?" in your settings. If you failed to do so, you're engaged to it. I think they'll be doing a mass wedding next year.

      Your only hope now is to hurry up and pre-emptively start divorce proceedings before the prenuptial agreement gets added to the terms of service...

  • by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday December 21, 2015 @02:46AM (#51157235) Journal

    As in a million grandmas and diehards still running XP thinking E stands for Internet noticed in terror their facebooks stopped playing videos and were silenced.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Considering that Vista is 9 years old now, it's not that surprising that the remaining 8% of users aren't well supported. But in any case, IE8 supports XP and HTML 5 video.

      • by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

        Considering that Vista is 9 years old now, it's not that surprising that the remaining 8% of users aren't well supported. But in any case, IE8 supports XP and HTML 5 video.

        XP does (if using Firefox/Chrome), IE8 does not [caniuse.com]

      • VIsta has IE 9. It was the 1st browser with HTML 5 support outside of Chrome. Still limited with many things like WebGL and CSS 3.1 compared to Edge/IE 11, but it does support mpeg4 and HTML 5 canvas for videos in IE 9. Nothing much else

  • engagement (Score:5, Informative)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Monday December 21, 2015 @03:11AM (#51157283) Homepage

    "Facebook reports that user engagement has gone up since the switch was made."

    No, this is absolutely total fucking bullshit. Engagement isn't "up" because of the switch from Flash to HTML5. Average end users wouldn't even know the difference. Why is engagement really "up"? Because they changed the god damn controls around. When playing a video, clicking on it no longer stops the fucking video, but instead takes over the whole god damn browser window with some video player playlist bullshit that nobody asked for. To stop a video now, you have to find the small pause button in the corner, rather than just being able to click anywhere. Give it a couple weeks for people to get pissed off enough to remember this, and their video player usage will tank again.

    • by Nutria ( 679911 )

      Is that inherent to HTML5, or programmer-controlled?

      I ask because both YT and FB use HTML5, but YT is "auto-play and click anywhere to pause", but FB is "click-to-play and click-the-pause-button"

      Anyway, standalone media players are click-the-pause-button, so it won't be that difficult to adjust.

    • Errr. Is this something related to your browser because I haven't experience this at all. And I have friend shitposting videos of their worthless pets all the time.

    • by sinij ( 911942 )

      "Facebook reports that user engagement has gone up since the switch was made."

      No, this is absolutely total fucking bullshit.

      With Flash, it was easy to block it wholesale. With HTML5? Not so much.

      Welcome back to punching monkeys.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    If my enemy's enemy is my friend, do I need to 'friend' Flash or Facebook now? I loathe them both pretty much equally...
  • Old news (Score:5, Informative)

    by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Monday December 21, 2015 @03:43AM (#51157363)
    What is this crusty rubbish? Facebook has been using HTML5 videos for months already.
  • FB video comes up black much of the time, any chance the switch to HTML5 fixed that issue?
  • I would care deeply about this, if only I had a Facebook account.

  • Now if only they would join the 20th century and let people upload animated GIFs to their posts!
  • As long as it doesn't require any special hardware acceleration like Netflix does.
  • Google Finance, for whatever reason, uses Flash for their financial charts. The non-flash version are a throwback to the mid 90's.
  • Imagine all the money they'll save in processing power no longer having to convert videos people have ripped off from Youtube into flash video formats. :D

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