HTML 5 <video> tag vs Flash video. What are the pros and cons?

Question

IMPORTANT UPDATE

This question was made over 9 years ago. It made sense then, it doesn\'t make it now. Flash is hard on its way out; sup

Answer 1

Adobe's Flash player (being a plugin) does not take any of the browser's privacy settings into account, while Adobe is not actively making clear to normal users what is being stored. This alone is a good reason to stop using Flash (or any video plugin) and welcome .

Some details about the privacy issues (not to be confused with security issues or vulnerabilities) can be found at How to automatically remove Flash history trail? on Super User.

Like Vilx noted in the comments: these privacy issues remain when replacing Flash-video by , as Flash is used in many more ways. Still, once is supported then site owners who offer video (and don't use Flash in any other way) will have a choice not to burden their visitors with this poorly documented record of visited Flash-sites.

(EDIT: I replaced the details with a link to SU, which gives some more insight; some of the comments below will only make sense with respect to a previous revision.)