Get rid of Flash and opt-in to HTML5 on YouTube and Vimeo

Anyone who has used Flash on a Mac can say that it’s more than just a nuisance. On top of the loading time Flash takes to play a video, for instance, it’s the leading source of application crashes on Mac OS X. In fact, Apple had to engineer a new plugin mechanism for Safari in Snow Leopard that would run plugins as a separate process, so if they crash, they wouldn’t crash Safari itself. In addition to that, while Safari runs as a 64-bit process, Flash still runs in 32-bit. It’s no wonder why Apple doesn’t want Flash on the iPhone and iPad.

Thankfully, the YouTube team has added an option to opt-in to viewing videos in HTML5 in lieu of Flash. (And here’s an interesting tidbit: The HTML5 editors are Ian Hickson of Google and David Hyatt of Apple—clearly someone’s not invited to the party.) You must have a modern browser to support these changes.

To enable HTML5, you must:

1. Visit this link: http://www.youtube.com/html5
2. Click on the link that says “Join the HTML5 Beta”

HTML5 in Vimeo is just as simple. Whenever you are viewing a video, click on the link at the bottom right hand corner of the screen that says, “Switch to HTML5 player” as seen in the image below. Enjoy your crisp, no wait-time video that doesn’t bog down your computer.

Related posts:

1. etc: Flash, now on the iPhone

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 3:52 am and is filed under Web Apps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.