Re: Rewriting YouTube's Flash video embedding code to use HTML video?
On 2015-08-21 6:17 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: Does Gecko have a precedent for rewriting certain HTML patterns? YouTube is migrating from Flash to HTML video, but many third-party websites copied YouTube's old example code to embedded Flash videos. YouTube's current embedding code automatically switches between Flash and HTML video, but YouTube can't fix third-party websites still using the old embedding code. Bug 769117 discusses whether Gecko should detect YouTube's old embedding boilerplate and automatically rewrite it to use the current code. Firefox and Safari extensions [1] [2] already do this, but should Gecko include this feature directly? It would improve users' video experience and fix dead links if/when Firefox or YouTube stop supporting Flash. OTOH, this is a site-specific workaround and thus might not belong in Gecko itself. We have done a site specific workaround in the past for hotmail that we almost shipped https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627729, so there is prior art here. I think that for the specific case at hand, it does make sense to add a site-specific workaround, since I think that the user facing benefit trumps the technical purity. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Rewriting YouTube's Flash video embedding code to use HTML video?
On 8/24/15 9:43 AM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: We have done a site specific workaround in the past for hotmail that we almost shipped https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627729, so there is prior art here. I think that for the specific case at hand, it does make sense to add a site-specific workaround, since I think that the user facing benefit trumps the technical purity. Thanks. I'll take a look. We're working with YouTube and they see these third-party sites as a problem, too. chris ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Rewriting YouTube's Flash video embedding code to use HTML video?
On 8/21/15 6:31 PM, Hubert Figuière wrote: On 21/08/15 06:17 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: Bug 769117 discusses whether Gecko should detect YouTube's old embedding boilerplate and automatically rewrite it to use the current code. Firefox and Safari extensions [1] [2] already do this, but should Gecko include this feature directly? It would improve users' video experience and fix dead links if/when Firefox or YouTube stop supporting Flash. OTOH, this is a site-specific workaround and thus might not belong in Gecko itself. It think that it is a feature that could be implemented in Firefox: 1. make it so that the rules are rewritable without updating the browser, or at least touching the core. ESR comes to mind as a reason why we'd love to update these. This sounds like a good use case for a system addon described by the Go Faster initiative. [1] 2. make it cross platform. Mobile (including FirefoxOS) would completely benefit from that. Case in point, Safari on iOS has been doing that for a very long time. +1. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster#Project_1:_Ship_features_as_system_add-ons -- Mike Taylor Web Compat, Mozilla ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Rewriting YouTube's Flash video embedding code to use HTML video?
Does Gecko have a precedent for rewriting certain HTML patterns? YouTube is migrating from Flash to HTML video, but many third-party websites copied YouTube's old example code to embedded Flash videos. YouTube's current embedding code automatically switches between Flash and HTML video, but YouTube can't fix third-party websites still using the old embedding code. Bug 769117 discusses whether Gecko should detect YouTube's old embedding boilerplate and automatically rewrite it to use the current code. Firefox and Safari extensions [1] [2] already do this, but should Gecko include this feature directly? It would improve users' video experience and fix dead links if/when Firefox or YouTube stop supporting Flash. OTOH, this is a site-specific workaround and thus might not belong in Gecko itself. chris [1] https://github.com/hfiguiere/no-flash/ [2] http://clicktoflash.com/ ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Rewriting YouTube's Flash video embedding code to use HTML video?
Disclaimer: I wrote the Firefox add-on mentioned, and I filed the bug mentioned as well. So my opinion is sorta made. On 21/08/15 06:17 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: Does Gecko have a precedent for rewriting certain HTML patterns? YouTube is migrating from Flash to HTML video, but many third-party websites copied YouTube's old example code to embedded Flash videos. YouTube's current embedding code automatically switches between Flash and HTML video, but YouTube can't fix third-party websites still using the old embedding code. Bug 769117 discusses whether Gecko should detect YouTube's old embedding boilerplate and automatically rewrite it to use the current code. Firefox and Safari extensions [1] [2] already do this, but should Gecko include this feature directly? It would improve users' video experience and fix dead links if/when Firefox or YouTube stop supporting Flash. OTOH, this is a site-specific workaround and thus might not belong in Gecko itself. It think that it is a feature that could be implemented in Firefox: 1. make it so that the rules are rewritable without updating the browser, or at least touching the core. ESR comes to mind as a reason why we'd love to update these. 2. make it cross platform. Mobile (including FirefoxOS) would completely benefit from that. Case in point, Safari on iOS has been doing that for a very long time. 3. don't make it specific to YouTube but specific to Flash. no-flash supports Dailymotion (the French YouTube) and Vimeo (rarer since they have done HTML5 embed for even longer). With 1. we can add rules easily. As for the question if Gecko has a feature, maybe that's where we implement it. I'm not sure if that's a feature to expose in the wild or not but given that we can do it with add-ons, and there are a few concrete use cases, we can possibly think of making this of general usefulness. Just my CAD$0.02 Hub ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Rewriting YouTube's Flash video embedding code to use HTML video?
On 21/08/15 07:52 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: 2. make it cross platform. Mobile (including FirefoxOS) would completely benefit from that. Case in point, Safari on iOS has been doing that for a very long time. Do you know what Safari is rewriting? I assume it's more than just Flash videos. It does a bit more, not sure exactly why. This is on iOS 8. For a Youtube video embedded in Flash, it replaces with the iframe, or a reasonbly looking substitute. To that it also will put its own video controller on video playback - losing the benefit of the rest of the Youtube bells and whistle. This is not only for Youtube but for HTML5 in general. Also I do believe they never autoplay (yay!) Note that Apple made the choice to not show a Flash placeholder - just empty space - which is IMHO bad. Cheers, Hub ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Rewriting YouTube's Flash video embedding code to use HTML video?
On 8/21/15 4:31 PM, Hubert Figuière wrote: Disclaimer: I wrote the Firefox add-on mentioned, and I filed the bug mentioned as well. So my opinion is sorta made. Yes, thank you! :) On 21/08/15 06:17 PM, Chris Peterson wrote: Does Gecko have a precedent for rewriting certain HTML patterns? YouTube is migrating from Flash to HTML video, but many third-party websites copied YouTube's old example code to embedded Flash videos. YouTube's current embedding code automatically switches between Flash and HTML video, but YouTube can't fix third-party websites still using the old embedding code. Bug 769117 discusses whether Gecko should detect YouTube's old embedding boilerplate and automatically rewrite it to use the current code. Firefox and Safari extensions [1] [2] already do this, but should Gecko include this feature directly? It would improve users' video experience and fix dead links if/when Firefox or YouTube stop supporting Flash. OTOH, this is a site-specific workaround and thus might not belong in Gecko itself. It think that it is a feature that could be implemented in Firefox: 1. make it so that the rules are rewritable without updating the browser, or at least touching the core. ESR comes to mind as a reason why we'd love to update these. 2. make it cross platform. Mobile (including FirefoxOS) would completely benefit from that. Case in point, Safari on iOS has been doing that for a very long time. Do you know what Safari is rewriting? I assume it's more than just Flash videos. 3. don't make it specific to YouTube but specific to Flash. no-flash supports Dailymotion (the French YouTube) and Vimeo (rarer since they have done HTML5 embed for even longer). With 1. we can add rules easily. As for the question if Gecko has a feature, maybe that's where we implement it. I'm not sure if that's a feature to expose in the wild or not but given that we can do it with add-ons, and there are a few concrete use cases, we can possibly think of making this of general usefulness. Good point. It could be a general pattern-matching/rewriting API available to add-ons. Regular expressions are part of the reason Adblock Plus is slow. We could move that matching into native code. chris ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
