The biggest change in JW6, at least on the surface, is the player UI itself. The player hadn’t changed dramatically since being launched in 2005, and it kind of looked that way. The new version follows the trend toward modern, chrome-less video players, with bigger controls to make it easier for users to navigate the video or turn on and off features. The LongTail team also added hovering displays for the timeslider, volume, and quality and captions menu when moused over.
But the team has also made a lot of changes to the player behind the scenes. They rewrote the code to make it faster, especially in HTML5 mode, where it takes advantage of modern browser improvements like the HTML5 Fullscreen API and CSS3 transitions. The player also has been enhanced to enable automatic switching between HTML5 and Flash playback, depending on which browser is trying to reach it. While it will default to HTML5 playback, the embedded player will playback in Flash if HTML5 is not supported.