Flash is dying a slow death, but it’s dying nonetheless. The outdated, vulnerability-riddled multi-media platform has reached the point where even Adobe itself is trying to kill it off, but massive portions of the Web are still using it, instead of upgrading to HTML5. Fortunately, Facebook is no longer one of the websites doing that, as its completely done away with its Flash-based video player in favor of an HTML5 one.
We recently switched to HTML5 from a Flash-based video player for all Facebook web video surfaces, including videos in News Feed, on Pages, and in the Facebook embedded video player. We are continuing to work together with Adobe to deliver a reliable and secure Flash experience for games on our platform, but have shipped the change for video to all browsers by default. From development velocity to accessibility features, HTML5 offers a lot of benefits. Moving to HTML5 best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs. Using web technologies allows us to tap into the excellent tooling that exists in browsers, among the open source community, and at Facebook in general. Not having to recompile code and being able to apply changes directly in the browser allow us to move fast. We have an excellent testing infrastructure at Facebook. By moving to HTML5 video, we can avail ourselves of all the web tools in that infrastructure, like jest and WebDriver, at our disposal.