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Chrome 54 Arrives With YouTube Flash Embed Rewriting To HTML5 (venturebeat.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the internet-browser dept.
Krystalo quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 54 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This release is mainly focused on developers, but the improvements to how the browser handles YouTube embeds is also noteworthy. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome. Chrome 54 rewrites YouTube Flash players to use the YouTube HTML5 embed style. YouTube ditched Flash for HTML5 by default in January 2015, but the old embeds still exist all over the web. Google says the change improves both performance and security for its desktop browser. The report adds that "Chrome also now provides support for the custom elements V1 spec," which allows "developers to create custom HTML tags as well as define their API and behavior in JavaScript." BroadcastChannel API will also be implemented "to allow one-to-many messaging between windows, tabs, iframes, web workers, and service workers." You can read more about Chrome 54 on Google's blog post.
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Chrome 54 Arrives With YouTube Flash Embed Rewriting To HTML5 More

Chrome 54 Arrives With YouTube Flash Embed Rewriting To HTML5

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  • Can you turn autostart off (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:06AM (#53068835)

    Can you turn autostart off?

    That's the one biggest factor that should be decided for any web-browser. You should be able to prevent autostart video with the native settings without add-ins or extensions.

    • Why would you want to have to click a button to start a video advertisement when it can play automatically? Truly puzzling.

      Signed,
      Google Director of Advertisements (and Advertisement Directors of Twitter and Yahoo and Microsoft and...)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I don't think you can, but this add-on works really well

      https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 )

      I know off-topic, but you can do this in Firefox via an about:config setting called media.autoplay.enabled. Setting the value to false kills auto-play for everything.

      What would be great is if website's allowed a white list for auto-play and banned everything else from auto-playing. And I mean it in the sense that "by default" or at the very least "built in", yes extensions are great but a browser packing something in indicates that they actually care about whatever it is they are packing in. Mozilla brou

    • That's a down side with this before I had disabled the flash plugin so if I wanted to watch/listen I had to enable it so I had a way of stopping autoplay for flash. Now it will convert them and play them anyway :|

    • Can you turn autostart off?

      They're an advertising firm: what do you think?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

      Forget preventing auto-playing videos, I want to prevent them from pre-loading in the first place. This is bandwidth wasting and anti-users since it eats in their monthly quota without them having asked for it.

  • html5 test still short 55 points. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:09AM (#53068849)

    "YOUR BROWSER SCORES 500 OUT OF 555 POINTS"
    In terms of HTML 5 compatibility I found that chrome tends to be in the lead. But with HTML5 and chrome out for years now... We really should be able to at 100% HTML5 compatibility.

    • You would think so...

      Chrome 53: 499
      Chrome 54: 500

      Looks like a pretty small step for developers, and a non-existent leap for consumers.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Html5test freely mixes things that are part of the HTML5 standard with things that are not. While the things it tests mostly have some value, it shouldn't be taken as an indicator of what browsers have "100% HTML5 compatibility".

    • But with HTML5 and chrome out for years now... We really should be able to at 100% HTML5 compatibility.

      Before you get up in arms, what is broken? What website have you visited where Chrome has failed to render correctly?

      I'm all for standards but if the standards include things that aren't done in practice then I don't see much of a need to get 100% compatibility.

  • This sounds like a great idea for a browser extension. Are any available for Firefox or older versions of Chrome? (I'm stuck on an old version of Chrome due to bugs they introduced that make it not work for me anymore.)

    • If there's not a ready-made extension, Tampermonkey will run the Javascript of your choice. I imagine it would take several minutes to write the Javascript to switch the Flash embed to html5. Tampermonkey is useful for all sorts of things. I have a TM script for Slashdot that gets rid of that "hosts file" guy who used to be on here. Any post that mentions that file name more than once, or has certain other strings, disappears for me.

  • What is the advantage of bypassing Flash? Besides getting rid of this pile of crap that has been polluting the computer world for 15 years?
    • You Tube is precisely the reason I disabled Flash plugin... with flash I was having so many glitches and lockups that could bring the whole browser down. Never had problems with html 5 content.
  • Does anyone have a fix for that error about the missing i386 file on Ubuntu/Debian when certain 32 bit packages are present? I've found a few proposed solutions [askubuntu.com], but none of them work. On my main box (Qubes OS, using a Debian 8 template), this error is especially annoying because it is preventing Qubes' update scripts from properly executing.

    • Does anyone have a fix for that error about the missing i386 file on Ubuntu/Debian when certain 32 bit packages are present? I've found a few proposed solutions [askubuntu.com], but none of them work. On my main box (Qubes OS, using a Debian 8 template), this error is especially annoying because it is preventing Qubes' update scripts from properly executing.

      Is it an apt missing or held package?

      • It's basically searching for an i386 version of Chrome and throwing an error when it doesn't find one (since this was discontinued by Google a while back.) I've never taken the time to familiarize myself with all of the finer points of apt / dpkg, so I'm fuzzy on precisely why this happens, but apparently it only happens if you've enabled 32 bit packages on your 64-bit Ubuntu/Debian install, and also (I think) installed certain 32 bit packages. It doesn't prevent you from installing or using 64-bit Chrome,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leiz ( 35205 )

      Has this always been a problem or did it start again in Chrome 54? You may want to file a bug report about it? https://crbug.com/new [crbug.com]

  • About time (Score:3)

    by Big Hairy Ian ( 1155547 ) on Thursday October 13, 2016 @08:58AM (#53069165)
    I like the way it takes a couple of seconds before it replaces the flash plugin just so you can see who's still banging rocks together (BBC I'm looking at you!)

  • I think the editors are just fucking with us now. Do we really think the slashdot editors have such a poor grasp of language that they throw out at least one completely unparsable headline every day unintentionally? Nobody is that stupid and incompetent. My money is that they're just trolling us now.

  • A web browser rewriting web pages is good thing?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13, 2016 @10:12AM (#53069625)

    Doesn't that seem counter-intuitive for a web browser to be rewriting the contents on a web page? Shouldn't it be rendering it exactly as the developers intended it? Isn't this the browser equivalent of a compiler that inserts malicious code in programs that it compiles?

    On top of all that, given that Google owns Youtube, you'd think they could change their code to use HTML5 on their side rather than writing a workaround in their web browser. Sounds like there's some internal conflict going on or something.

    • Shouldn't it be rendering it exactly as the developers intended it?

      Hell no. That way lies damnation, PDFs, and embedded images with text on them.

      HTML is, first and foremost, about content. CSS is about style, but those are suggestions.

      And Youtube has been converting uploaded videos to HTML5 complaint ones for a while now. I suppose they don't have the time to backconvert their whole catalog, although I heard they were slowly doing so..

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Shouldn't it be rendering it exactly as the developers intended it?

      The Flash -> HTML5 rewriting option does indeed display the page as intended, unless the intention was to waste bandwidth and CPU cycles and still display a sub-par rendering of the video. Or maybe if you are a fan of Flash and want everyone to suffer under it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      Doesn't that seem counter-intuitive for a web browser to be rewriting the contents on a web page?

      Speaking as someone who goes to extra trouble to add various extensions (e.g. ublock origin, privacy badger, tampermonkey, etc) to fix web pages because the browser still doesn't do enough, and who used proxies (squid-with-sleezeball, privoxy) before we had good browser extensions: no, it doesn't seem even slightly counter-intuitive. Why would it be counter-intuitive? I totally don't get it.

      Shouldn't it be rende

    • Not at all. The browser is a tool of the user to interpret the code on a website. How it behaves as a result should be up to the user. Realistically, it usually ends up being decided by the browser maker, but the page's developers shouldn't come first.

    • Shouldn't it be rendering it exactly as the developers intended it?

      Malware and all?

  • So, does that mean it also rewrites all the Flash security holes into HTML5 security holes as well ?!?
  • This means that I'll be able to use my new favorite Chrome extension - Video Speed Controller - to crank up the speed of more videos I encounter in my clickings. Not affiliated with that extension.
  • i want that awful awful thing wiped off the internet, now when i upgrade chromium i will have to find a way to disable this exciting new feature, thx

  • BroadcastChannel API will also be implemented "to allow one-to-many messaging between windows, tabs, iframes, web workers, and service workers."

    And guess who's going to use that crap first? Advertisers. If you were able to avoid being targeted and tracked so far, you have zero chance now.

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