HTML 5 Takes Aim At Flash and Silverlight

snydeq writes "While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors' lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard. In fact, one expressed goal of the standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX. 'It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform [the Web] was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been,' says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee. But whether HTML 5 and its Canvas technology will displace proprietary plug-ins 'really depends on what developers do,' says Firefox technical lead Vlad Vukicevic. It also depends on Microsoft, the only company involved in the HTML 5 effort that is both a browser developer and an RIA tool developer. 'That's a big elephant in the room for them because you can imagine the Silverlight team [whose] whole existence is to add [this] functionality in. [But] if Internet Explorer puts it already in there, why do we have Silverlight?' asks Mozilla's Dion Almaer." The RIA guys are quoted as saying they're not worried, because HTML 5 + CSS 3 is 10 years out. Are they just whistling in the dark?

Comments

Re:It's the tools stupid

[hedwards]

There's that, but Adobe like Macromedia before them has been dickish in the way that they handled it. The development tools are what makes them money, but they've done a poor job of making the player available beyond 32bit OSes. And if you're wanting something other than Mac, Win or Linux, you're basically completely screwed as far as Adobe is concerned.

Right now the only way that I can see youtube is either by booting into Windows or running Firefox in Wine. That's completely unacceptable for a de facto web standard. Not to mention the tendency of the official plug ins to crash frequently and the tendency of idiot customers to demand Flash only sites.

And don't get me started on shockwave, it was a couple of steps worse.

400M Silverlight installs

[benwaggoner]

There have been 400M downloads of Silverlight so far.

That's more than the total market share of Firefox + Safari + Chrome (+ Linux + Mac + iPhone + Android if you're thinking platforms). So Silverlight's already a bigger audience than every browser NOT IE running on Windows.

Popfly is hardly meant to be the big Silverlight install driver :). In the USA, the highest profile Silverlight projects have probably been Netflix and the Olympics (Beijing and soon Vancouver), with the Masters and NCAA March Madness as recent big ones.

Because so much of media is geoblocked, the big Silverlight drivers vary by market. Russia has RuTube, South Korea has all major broadcasters and the leading search provider. France just had their big Tennis tournament.