YouTube's Video Pick Spells Doom for Adobe Flash

Adobe Systems' Flash software had a good long run as the technology of choice for bringing interactive splash to the Web, but Google is helping to give it the heave-ho by moving YouTube to Web-standard video instead. "We're now defaulting to the HTML5 player on the Web," said YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider in a blog post Tuesday. It took four years for Google to make the HTML5 change, which is a major victory for Web standards fans who've strived to eject proprietary plug-ins from the Web.

If you watched a video online 10 years or so, ago, it was almost certainly delivered with Flash. That's because Flash gave people an easy way to publish and share video in a way everyone could access - similar to what Adobe did with its PDF file format and Acrobat document creation tool. That was during a period of relatively slow change for the Web, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market but remained static for years. Adobe acquired Flash's creator, Macromedia, for $3.4 billion in 2005.