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Twitch joins the list of sites moving to ditch Flash for HTML5
Popular live-streaming site Twitch has become yet another web service to move away from Adobe Flash, the ailing media platform that has long been the dominant method of displaying multimedia content online.
While Twitch’s video streams will continue to use Flash, at least for now, the service is moving the video controls themselves over to HTML5.
“The underlying HTML5 video playback works great and we’ve been testing it internally for a few months,” said Reddit user kixelated, who is a Twitch staff member working on the HTML5 player. “The problem is that we do EVERYTHING in Flash right now, so we have to port every feature one-by-one into HTML/JS before we can release the player. We also can’t completely remove Flash, because browser support for MSE is still missing for Firefox and older Safari/IE browsers.”
“So, we decided to split the HTML5 player into two releases,” he continued. “1) move the UI into HTML/JS and 2) move the video into HTML/JS. The new player UI, is pretty swanky and we’ll start rolling it out to users in a few weeks.”
Twitch explained that the new features would be a gradual rollout, so they will not be immediately available to everyone, and as kixelated explained, it could be some time before Twitch fully supports HTML5 streaming.
The list of supporters for Flash is quickly dwindling, especially after recent security concerns that led Mozilla Firefox to completely disable Flash support in its browser until the issue was resolved.
“When Mozilla becomes aware of add-ons, plugins, or other third-party software that seriously compromises Firefox security, stability, or performance and meets certain criteria, the software may be blocked from general use,” Mozilla said in an announcement on its site at the time.
Twitch is also not the only video service trying to move away from Flash. YouTube recently made its HTML5 player the default method of playing video, saying that “These advancements have benefited not just YouTube’s community, but the entire industry. Other content providers like Netflix and Vimeo, as well as companies like Microsoft and Apple, have embraced HTML5 and been key contributors to its success.”
Image credit: Twitch
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