Ten Years Ago This Week: YouTube Puts a Nail in Flash's Coffin

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending February 1, 2015.

Ten years ago this week, YouTube started defaulting to the HTML5 video player, which was one more nail in the coffin for Adobe Flash.

Watch the Short version below.

Flash in 2015

Internet Archive Flash Showcase

If you remember the internet in the 2000s and 2010s, Flash was everywhere. It powered lots of games, really slow loading web sites, and of course video players.

Want to relive those days? The Internet Archive has a "curated collection of interesting or historical Flash animations and games", running with an emulator.

In 2015 Flash was already dead on mobile, because it was never supported on iOS devices (including iPod, iPhone, and iPad), and the last version of Flash for Android was released in November 2011.

At the time, Flash was widely reviled, especially as there were serious security issues.

But it was still being used on the web, and YouTube stepping back from it had a significant impact.

This change began with Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8, and Firefox betas and all subsequent browsers.

Advantages of HTML5

YouTube started experimenting with the HTML5 video player in 2010, but didn't consider it to be ready to be the default until 2015.

YouTube shared several significant advantages of the switch to a default HTML5 video player. Among the advantages:

YouTube could take advantage of the open VP9 video codec. This was developed by Google, and allowed higher video quality, at significantly lower bandwidth.
It supports MediaSource Extensions that enable live streaming in game consoles (Xbox, PS 4) and on devices like the Chromecast.
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming allows YouTube to adjust resolution and bitrate when network conditions change, reducing buffering.
WebRTC "enables everyone to share their videos with the world", both by uploading and live streaming from a browser.
It supports an "immersive fullscreen viewing experience" with a standard HTML web page interface.

At the time, The Verge wrote:

YouTube's move highlights the shrinking relevance of Adobe Flash on the modern internet. Adobe itself has spent the last few years severing many of its ties with the product — the company's Flash 2012 Flash roadmap narrowed its focus to gaming and "premium" video, and in 2011, the company killed Flash Player for mobile, saying at the time that HTML5 was the "best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms." In 2015, YouTube has realized that Flash is not the best solution for web video, full stop.

Killing Flash Embeds

In writing this, I found flash video embeds on my old blog.
This was the error message before I fixed them.

One of the nice features of the YouTube video player is that it could easily be embedded on your own website or blog.

With this update, YouTube stopped supporting Flash <object> embedded videos. That meant website owners needed to update all their embedded videos to <iframe> embeds (the current standard). YouTube could then "intelligently use whichever technology the client supports".

Updating all the embedded videos was likely a major project for websites, and today I still occasionally see older sites with broken embedded video players.

YouTube did temporarily display a "view in YouTube" button, but that was eventually replaced by a grey error message.

What happened after 2015?

IsFlashDeadYet.com confirms that Flash is dead

YouTube continued to support the Flash video player on older TVs and other devices until June 2017.

Not long after, in July 2017, Adobe announced that they would stop updating and distributing the Flash player in December 2020. Google announced they would remove Flash support in Chrome, as would Microsoft Edge and Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple.

Adobe blocked Flash content running in the Flash Player on January 12, 2021.

HTML5 was also officially retired in January 2021, followed by the new HTML Living Standard. Fortunately, that hasn't broken the YouTube video player on decade-old sites.

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