Masquerading as Mobile Safari to Get Websites to Serve HTML5 Video to Safari | Hacker News Reader

Masquerading as Mobile Safari to Get Websites to Serve HTML5 Video to Safari

daringfireball.net

17 pointslotusleaf198710 comments

ClickToFlash has a lot of the same benefits as uninstalling Flash when browsing in Safari.

And be sure to opt in to YouTube's HTML5 trial:

http://www.youtube.com/html5

As it has been said before, ClickToFlash pretends to be a Flash plugin itself. This will send wrong signals to web developers about the installation base of Flash.

Also, YouTube's HTML5 does not cover all videos (esp. those with ads). Install the YouTube5 Safari extension <http://www.verticalforest.com/2010/06/09/youtube5-html5-conv...; and you'll have very YouTube video served to you in H.264, and with a really neat HTML5-based player. Try it and I'll bet you'll fall in love with it immediately.

I would suggest anyone not happy with Flash and want to see it die do as Gruber did: remove Flash and try to disguise the browser as an iPad. Enough people doing so would probably have some impact on the web devs.

It's embarrassing that professional web site developers are using User Agent String detection to decide whether to serve Flash or HTML5 Video.

I'm curious, what should they be using? The "Accept" HTTP header?

http://diveintohtml5.org/detect.html#techniques

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/download/detection...

Now, if you have a browser which supports both HTML5 video and Flash, it's arguable which a player should default to. However, at the moment there seems to be an assumption on many sites that:

- "desktop" browser => has Flash

- mobile browser => doesn't have Flash

which gets pretty annoying for those of us who prefer not to install Flash.

I've not done any exhaustive testing, but beware that some YouTube videos won't play in Mobile Safari, even though they play fine on the standalone iPad YT app. Instead you get the "You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video" warning.

e.g. "New order - Perfect kiss (10 minutes version)", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--pSWLEVGhY

That video appears to play just fine without flash if you change your user agent to iPad.

Sorry, wrong link - the URL used for the iframe embed version (which I guess is what you'd use to include the video on a regular webpage, rather than the link I previously posted) is http://www.youtube.com/embed/--pSWLEVGhY

On regular Safari pretending to be an iPad, this plays the video in Flash player; on a real iPad it comes up with the "install Flash" message.

If you view source on that embed link, near the bottom you'll find a JavaScript array called FORMAT_MAP, which is empty. On a video which is available in HTML5 formats, this would have multiple members, containing the URLs etc for the video in different formats/quality.

before I got this mac, I used an old (currently 6 years old) thinkpad running bsd as my main computer. Flash video killed the performance of the machine.

Eventually I discovered that setting my browser (midori [1]) to identify always as mobile safari, I get far better performance and video that I can actually watch.

[1] http://www.twotoasts.de/

Why would a developer not want to deliver traffic to everyone with HTML5 video? There an inherently higher cost (bandwidth) or something that I'm unaware of? Seems if I have the video in a format that will work for HTML5, that I'd want to deliver it as that if the user's browser can deal with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com