YouTube And The Flash Problem

If I try and pull up the new Vampire Weekend song, “Ya Hey”, in Safari on a Macbook Pro without Flash installed I get the fuzzy screen letting me know I need Flash installed. If I visit the same page on an iPad though, the video plays fine.

Why should it make a difference if I’m on an iPad or mobile device in order to get the version of the video that plays without Flash? Visiting Youtube.com/html5 lets you opt into using HTML5 instead of Flash when available, though that’s still not guarantee to get universal access on desktops or laptops.

There are plenty of examples of big-time players like Netflix and even Google’s Android moving away from Flash, but none seem to come fast enough with a clean enough break. This isn’t about them though, this is about the roulette game that’s played every time a link to YouTube shows up in my feed.

It’s time for YouTube to completely cut the Flash cord and force people to install or upgrade a browser rather than force the outdated player on them.