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Five Years of YouTube and Forced Evolution
NakNak writes to mention that the DailyMaverick has a feature looking back at five years of YouTube, some of the massive changes that have been forced through as a result of its overwhelming popularity, and what changes might be necessary going forward. "Google, which bought YouTube less than two years after it was founded for what was then considered outrageously expensive $1.65 billion, does not want Microsoft or Apple (or anybody else) to own the dominant video format. So it has become the biggest early tester of HTML5. Your browser doesn't support HTML5? Google launches its own browser, Chrome. Need to use Internet Explorer at work because that's all your IT department supports? Google launches a Chrome framework that effectively subverts IE and makes it HTML5-compatible. The final blow will be the day that YouTube switches off Flash and starts streaming only to HTML5 browsers. On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage."
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage
Or, like the thousands of examples that came before.....people will simply go to another website that does not have such requirements.
But don't let me rain on your parade.
There won't be enough waaaambulances in the entire world to handle the mass-casualty incident at Adobe HQ...
Name a popular flash-only site than a majority of iPhone users visit on a regular basis on their desktop or laptop.
YouTube works on iPhone, and Safari for iPhone supports HTML5. From an industry perspective, iPhone's lack of Flash is a *good* thing. From a personal standpoint, as an iPhone user, its a small negative - something that would be nice, but to be honest, I don't really miss.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.). It will then be up to the user to aquire the required codecs and what not, which can't legally be distributed in North America as entirely free software, (but in practice, patents have never stopped free software before, only creates annoying red tape.) Gstream and ffmpeg have been able to handle h264 for longer than I remember, and I don't expect that to change at all. It's probably a good thing that Firefox will use existing software rather than creating yet another decoder to deal with.
User gets angry at YouTube, not IE
"YouTube no longer uses Flash. Now we use Chrome Frame to provide you with new features. Click here to install Chrome Frame." The user response really isn't that much different from the "Your Flash Player is too old" that YouTube started serving once Nintendo finally upgraded Wii Internet Channel from Flash 7.
I've been selected to try out the new YouTube video page. If that's forced evolution, then I don't want to be a part of it...
There are no normal links anywhere anymore. Whereas previously the video links were http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxx, they are now monstrosities with a hundred characters in the URL.
It's all full of AJAX. I haven't tried disabling JS to see what happens... The layout has changed, it's confusing, and it's ugly. When the video you are watching stops, the next one starts automatically, as if it were all a giant playlist.
If you get that piece of garbage (which is a clear devolution, not an evolution), delete YouTube's cookies. I'm not sure which one was responsible; I just got rid of all of them and got normal YouTube back.
And nobody mentioned the IE 6 ban in G-Docs... Google is moving the internet foward.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Just to nitpick, Vimeo works perfectly on iPhone and, in fact, has an iPhone optimised interface.
As an aside, more people should develop their site to work on an iPhone first, then scale it up. It forces you to decide what it *actually* important on the site. If it isn't needed on iPhone, why is it needed on the full version?
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
[...] Just delegate it to the OS [...]
So next time there is some remote code execution vulnerability in DirectShow and/or its codecs, you want Firefox users to be affected too?
Face it, with the amount of "plugins" installed by default in Firefox these days in the back of the user (Acrobat, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Media Player, etc.), Firefox has become as much vulnerable as Internet Explorer, if not more because of its lack of usage of Vista's integrity levels.
Let's not add another nail to its coffin.