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Monday, June 15, 2015

Facebook remains in the dark ages

What is HTML5? Most people would be able to answer this question, whether they are highly educated IT professionals or a hobby programmer, but at Facebook it seams as if they are still struggling with this strange concept.

The thing that I love the most about HTML5, is the fact that we no longer need any plug-ins to be installed in browsers. It's canvas and socket features replaces the old and terrible Java Applets. Don't get me wrong, I love Java. It's a nice programming language and it's great when you want to easily port programs across multiple architectures. But the Java Applets is one of the worst thing ever created, next to Microsoft's ActiveX (Along with their Browser). It will not be missed. The HTML5 Video and EME features replaces both Flash and Silverlight. Both of which brings nothing but instability and security vulnerabilities.

For a long time now, I have not had any plug-ins installed in my browser and I have not had any reason to. It seams that the vast majority of websites has either switched to full HTML5 or at least provide this as a second option. The few sites that don't, are not very important. At least that has been my observation until today.

My brother wanted to show me a video on my laptop. He navigated to Facebook and logged into he's account. He then searched for a specific video and tried to play it, but it wouldn't start because Flash is not installed in my browser. I don't use Facebook myself, so I have never noticed this. But Facebook, one of the worlds largest websites, do not have any support for HTML5 playback. Personally I have never liked Facebook, I cannot say why as I don't really know it myself. Nevertheless I have always pictured them as technologically advanced. Properly because I could not imagine a website being able to reach this magnitude of popularity while falling behind in this area. They proved me wrong.

Why am I writing about this? I have no idea. Maybe it's just the chock getting to me. Next to Google/Youtube, this was the last place that I would ever expect to be so far behind in technology. I mean this is freaking Facebook that we are talking about, and their only video solution is Flash? A technology that should have been extinct by now. And this is just the observation I made in the 2 minutes that my brother was trying to get this video to play. This is something that I would have expected from a small personal site where the owner had not yet had the time or resources to make the switch. But even those sites are up-to-date. The only one missing is the one that should have plenty of resources and highly skilled personal to do it, although I am starting to doubt the later.