Facebook has dumped Adobe’s Flash Player as the default player for online videos and has instead opted for HTML5.

The move will come a huge blow to the already tainted Flash Player, which has seen a declining user base owing to vulnerabilities that are discovered every few days. Facebook becomes the latest to join the ‘ditch Flash’ and ‘adopt HTML5’ bandwagon.

The social networking giant announced that it has switched to HTML5 for all its video content including videos in News Feed, on Pages, and in the Facebook embedded video player. However, the site will still continue to work with Adobe and deliver a secure Flash experience for games.

“We are continuing to work together with Adobe to deliver a reliable and secure Flash experience for games on our platform, but have shipped the change for video to all browsers by default”, Facebook notes in a blog post.

Facebook hasn’t directly pointed out the security issues with Flash as its reason for the switch and instead has chosen to highlight the benefits of HTML5 including development velocity, testability, and accessibility for the switch.

Getting the logging right, browser bugs, worse performance in old browsers, and page load time regression are some of the challenges that Facebook developers had to overcome before they were able to roll out HTML5 video support across all browsers.

As far as benefits are concerned, Facebook says: “Not only did launching the HTML5 video player make development easier, but it also improved the video experience for people on Facebook. Videos now start playing faster.”