14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube decided last month to switch to HTML5 as the default standard for all videos, in what was pretty much the most severe hit received by Flash Player in the last 12 months or so.
Many predicted the death of Flash Player and some pointed to security vulnerabilities in Adobe's browser runtime environment as the main reason for this sudden migration from Flash, but it turns out that many users aren't yet ready to give up on it. No matter the security risks, that is.
A Mozilla Firefox extension that allows YouTube users to load Flash by default instead of HTML5, and which has less than 30 days online has already been downloaded by more than 190,000 users, and the number is very likely to grow as more people find out about this browser plug-in.
Why some want to go back to Flash Player
It's really hard to find a reason for sticking to Flash Player when so many people find it terribly slow and full of bugs, be they affecting security or the overall performance when browsing the web.
A look at the reviews posted on the official page of the Firefox extension reveals that, in some cases, HTML5 isn't working as expected, even though Flash Player is pretty much famous for its terrible performance on some computers.
“Youtube kept playing video's using the HTML5 player, even though I wanted to use flash, since the HTML5 player used >80% cpu and videos had all sorts of buffering and stuttering problems,” one user explained.
At the same time, the developer of the extension claims that YouTube videos loaded with Flash Player “have more high-resolution options than the HTML5 video player,” so those who want to watch clips in the best possible quality, might have to give this plug-in a try.
In the meantime, Firefox itself is working on a way to run Flash content, be it videos, ads, games or anything else, without Flash Player, as part of a new project called Shumway. Mozilla thus aims to make Firefox not only more secure but also faster and more reliable by avoiding the setbacks that Flash Player comes with on all supported platforms.