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Yahoo! joins! Adobe! Flash! flush! mob!
HTML5 all the way. But nor for ads, so keep those malware shields up, people
Yahoo! has joined the flood of companies flushing Adobe's Flash.
Amit Jain, a senior developer at the p0wned purple portal, has penned a piece for Streaming Media in which he explains Yahoo!'s transition to HTML 5.
Jain explains that Yahoo! sniffed the wind before streaming an American Football match in late 2015. The company developed an HTML5 player for that match, but only for Apple's Safari browser. By then the company had sniffed the wind, concluded that Flash stank and decided to build a cross-platform player.
The company's since done so, eschewing existing open source efforts in favour of a ground-up build for its new video player.
But Flash is not gone from Yahoo! pages: Jain explains that “most video advertisers continue to rely on Flash.”
“As such, we had to find a seamless way to serve ad content on Flash while leveraging HTML5 for content playback. We built our player to use different renderers—the component that uses a given rendering technique (Flash, HTML5, etc.) for video playback—while maintaining a seamless experience. This allowed us to give users the optimal experience while protecting ad revenue.”
That's a bit scary because Yahoo! ads have an extensive history as a source of malware. Jain's post is also scary for its revelation that “we are also optimizing for video streaming performance of multiple videos on the same page.” Which won't be irritating at all to users.
For now, Yahoo! is focussed on completing the rollout of its HTML5 video player to all browsers and to mobile devices. 7Reg;