Another nail has been hammered into the coffin of Flash technology as Facebook has confirmed that it has ditched the Adobe plugin for video playback, Digital Spy reports.

The world's leading social network is switching to a HTML5-powered solution in a move that should result in fewer bug reports and faster playback.

Facebook said that it is only now switching to HTML5 because of the number of users that were running an outdated browser or operating system that is poorly optimised for the standard.

Flash has long been a popular means of creating interactive video for the web, but critics of the technology argue that it leaves users open to security risks and demands high memory usage.

Facebook's decision to drop the plugin for videos comes just weeks after Adobe itself started encouraging developers to switch to more modern standards, like HTML5.

But the social network isn't about to become a Flash-free zone as the tech will continue to power games on there for the time being.