Flash and HTML5 – Competitors or complementary solutions?
There seems to be a heated and highly polarised debate in progress about Flash and HTML5. There also seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around and some misunderstandings about what Flash and HTML5 are, what they can do and how the future of the web is likely to shape up in the next ten years.Microsft, Apple, Adobe and Google are all competing for their own particular profit models and market share. Most of the debate and the disagreements have little to do with what the best technology for the web is or what’s best for developers and users. The link at the end of this post is a sober, well-informed article written by Jeremy Allaire, founder of the Flash MX platform, ColdFusion and Brightcove.
Also, please note that the developments in HTML5 RIAs that they’re talking about are in quite a long-term time frame by web technology standards. Don’t be fooled by Google’s “hard push” campaigns and their YouTube.com/html5 beta demo. Try it out in IE8 and you’ll see it’s still the Flash plugin video player and Internet Explorer still accounts for almost 59% of web browser usage, with versions 6 and 7 making up the majority share. Unless there’s some radical change in web browser user behaviour, we aren’t going to see a widely distributed full implementation of HTML5 on users’ desktop browsers for at least another ten years.
Here’s the article:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/the-future-of-web-content-html5-flash-mobile-apps/
Tags: Flash, Google, Javascript, video
By Matt, March 14, 2010 @ 2:07 am
Hi, I’ve seen many people claim on blogs and forums that HTML5 will out-perform Flash Player, especially for video. While I very much doubt that any amount of Javascript optimisation could ever outperform Actionscript 3.0, it is quite reasonable to claim that a browser with a built-in video player (one of the ideas behind HTML5) would perform better than a plugin such as Flash.
The reality turns out to be somewhat more complicated and can vary greatly depending on what operating system and browser you’re using. This article, by Jan Ozer, sheds some much needed light on the subject: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html
By Chris, March 15, 2010 @ 8:25 pm
Well, to make a bet for the long run:
* Google pushes VP8 open source, making it the most used video-codec.
* Adobe includes VP8 into the Flash Player and pushs it open source (since they claim it’s closed because of h.264).
* Adobe kills .fla to .xfl (http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/workflow/r-i-p-fla/#more-3064=
* Google presents an own IDE for javascript, that is based on jquery.
* Yahoo declares bankruptcy
* Microsoft claims Silverlight to only work with a registered version of Windows 11
* Adobe pushs Actionscript open source.
* Flash and Javascript are again competing concepts in the web, but now both are open source. Adobe makes a fortune by selling Flash as the ultimate IDE while no longer playing the bad boy.
By Matt, March 15, 2010 @ 10:49 pm
=)))
* I bet Adobe won’t make Flash Player open source.
* It would be great to have a competitive open source CODEC out there.
* I hope Yahoo! don’t go bankrupt. Google needs the competition.