Chrome 54 Arrives With YouTube Flash Embed Rewriting To HTML5 (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday October 13, 2016 @01:00AM from the internet-browser dept.

Krystalo quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 54 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This release is mainly focused on developers, but the improvements to how the browser handles YouTube embeds is also noteworthy. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome. Chrome 54 rewrites YouTube Flash players to use the YouTube HTML5 embed style. YouTube ditched Flash for HTML5 by default in January 2015, but the old embeds still exist all over the web. Google says the change improves both performance and security for its desktop browser. The report adds that "Chrome also now provides support for the custom elements V1 spec," which allows "developers to create custom HTML tags as well as define their API and behavior in JavaScript." BroadcastChannel API will also be implemented "to allow one-to-many messaging between windows, tabs, iframes, web workers, and service workers." You can read more about Chrome 54 on Google's blog post.

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A web browser rewriting web pages is good thing?? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-13 03:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

Doesn't that seem counter-intuitive for a web browser to be rewriting the contents on a web page? Shouldn't it be rendering it exactly as the developers intended it? Isn't this the browser equivalent of a compiler that inserts malicious code in programs that it compiles?
On top of all that, given that Google owns Youtube, you'd think they could change their code to use HTML5 on their side rather than writing a workaround in their web browser. Sounds like there's some internal conflict going on or something.