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by rplnt 3778 days ago
Let's see when Facebook converts. For some reason they love to serve Flash based SOLELY on user agent. So you have a chrome fork without flash? Here, watch this flash. Oh, and this gif is now flash as well.

I can't quite figure out why.. but I would vote for incompetence. Can't see any business motivation for doing that.
2 comments
tomschlick 3778 days ago
They probably just have a whitelist of user agents that they have verified HTML5 video to work well on... If it's anything they don't recognize they serve flash.
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mmcclure 3778 days ago
I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but they also don't allow you to embed a custom HTML5 player, just Flash. So, if you're a content producer or platform that wants to use your own player, your only option is to embed a SWF.

The irony is that I'm pretty sure the reasoning has security in there somewhere.

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waterlesscloud 3778 days ago
Yes, Facebook, full of incompetent engineers.

I'll never understand why HN is so desperate to believe something that clearly isn't true.

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Practicality 3778 days ago
Because the alternative is some kind of conspiracy theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

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