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HTML5 vs. Flash — the Case For Flash
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers seven reasons why web designers will remain loyal to Flash for rich web content, despite 'seductive' new capabilities offered by HTML5. Sure, HTML5 aims to duplicate many of the features that were once the sole province of plugins (local disk storage, video display, better rendering, algorithmic drawing, and more) and has high-profile backers in Google and Apple, but as Wayner sees it, this fight is more about designers than it is about technocrats and programmers. And from its sub-pixel resolution, to its developer tools, to its 'write once, play everywhere' functionality, Flash has too much going for it to fall by the wayside. 'The designers will make the final determination. As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.'"
"As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet."
Okay, now you're just trolling.
i understand the arguement, but don't forget about performance and stability.
wait and see how smooth, fast, and stable the HTML5 sites are to the flash counterparts.
give it time.
None of the flash benefits described by the article are impossible to replicate in HTML5/browser/javascript, and it's naive to assume that the new ecosystem wont continue to evolve over time just as flash has.
This one has multiple fronts. Don't let anyone kid you, this isn't A vs. B, it is at least ABC vs. XYZ where each factor is independently weighed and measured.
Remember to maintain your supply of
I already block Flash automatically, as it drags down performance and rarely adds any content.
There are a few cases in which useful content has been designed in Flash, but most of the time it is useless eye candy - and more often than not, just pure advertising. A great way to block most advertising that you do not want is to block Flash. Why would you not want to do that?
No website on this planet is "drop-dead gorgeous"... a woman (or man if you prefer) in real 3D right in front of you and that you can touch and communicate with is infinitely much more "drop-dead gorgeous" even if they are butt ugly.
The whole point of flash was that the standards were so ignored that designers were glomping onto something, anything, that would show consistently across the browsers. But at this point with Firefox having the market share that it does and the other minor browsers taking on as many installs as they do by being more or less standards compliant, I fail to see why any designer in their right mind would be using Flash where alternatives exist.
As long as it isn't a real standard you're going to be giving up a portion of the potential market by using a proprietary plug in that isn't universally supported. Not to mention the people that block it because of the problems it causes and the abuses of technology over the years.
And I've done my own write-up about these multiple fronts. I've listed three advantages for HTML5 and six for SWF.
Why recreate when you can just play it in HTML5 natively? http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/06/01/1748200
My Counterpoint: The same article, with only 1 flash ad. Otherwise it's 28 Flash ads...
http://infoworld.com/print/125721
But at this point with Firefox having the market share that it does and the other minor browsers taking on as many installs as they do by being more or less standards compliant, I fail to see why any designer in their right mind would be using Flash where alternatives exist.
Because Firefox itself is a minor browser. More than half of web users (and likely more than half of your site's customers) use Internet Explorer 8 or earlier, whose DOM doesn't support all features needed to replace SWF. For example, where's SVG? Where's the 2D canvas? Where's procedural audio?
"Drop dead gorgeous" has nothing to do with the technology being used. That is the weakest argument yet for Flash.
I think the number one reason for not going to HTML5 is MSIE. Microsoft has no intention of creating a fully standards compliant browser. If they did that, they would likely also need to make their web based applications standards compliant and that would end their lock-in for Windows on the desktop and server where web applications are concerned. And MSIE is still the major browser out there.
Web developers don't like creating sites for MSIE and sites for others. It's lots of work. Just doing it in flash will assure that the flashy parts of the page will display well on all devices where HTML5 will not.
Now if by some miracle, Microsoft decides to change its selfish ways and gets compliant, that would be another thing entirely. But before anyone moves forward, something has to be done about the Microsoft problem.
Someone comes up with an IDE that rivals the Flash tool set that uses HTML5 and Javascript and Flash is dead.
The biggest advantage that the new technologies have that flash has been trying very hard to get into is the ease with which interactive applications that integrate well with the browser and backend services can be developed without having to pay huge scaling licensing fees to anyone. The designers are certainly critical in making applications look good, but they don't get to decide what technologies the system is built on, they have to work with what they are given. If the requirements are that the webapp does X, Y and Z which flash cannot do, then it doesn't really matter what the designer would prefer to work with. They will be forced to work with what they are told to work with. If the need for good tools is great enough than the development of said tools will inevitably follow.
I started to pray that Flash would die as soon as they took away the user controls that let me stop the idiotic flickering, bouncing, annoying ads.
Yes, I spit coffee at my screen when I read that quote from Adobe. Apparently their Flash engineers haven't tried to go to Vimeo while running Linux. It's mind-numbingly slow on my 2.8ghz P4 system running Ubuntu 10.04 and Chrome 6 (with integrated Flash 10.1). Contrarily, HTML5 YouTube plays content using 20% of my CPU. Adobe engineers even admit that Flash is not designed to be a video player -- so perhaps there is room for both technologies going forward.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
How about flash sucks because it doesn't include a volume controls by default?
That's all it takes to trump that idiotic article.
Don't get me wrong, there are many other reasons to hate flash, (Including some of the reasons identified in the article as reasons to use flash: Flash's sub-pixel resolution and anti-aliasing and Flash's supercool fonts ) and that's not even the biggest one. But its more than adequate to just beg for that POS to die.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Reason No. 5: Flash is write once, play everywhere. Flash 10 support on Wii? Nope. Flash support on Nintendo DS? Nope? Flash 10 support on Android 1.6? Nope. Flash support on iPhone/iPad? Nope. There's everything from Flash 7 to Flash 10 out there in the field; saying you can write something for Flash ten and have it "play everywhere" is blatant bullshit. Plus, some devices simply don't have enough memory to run bloated Flash apps! Flash apps takes a long time to load because they are BIG. Sure, embedding fonts in the app is a great idea -- if you don't care how big the app is.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
is because it's only as good as Adobe implementation on your platform, and they and they alone decide whether your platform is worth sticking money/time into to make a better flash player. It's not a standard. Unlike a browser, no one else can go out and decide to make a better flash player (gnash ignored).
My 1.67Ghz G4 Powerbook to this day can only play flash videos extremely choppy and games hardly at all. It can play downloaded video or DVDs just fine.
As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet
I don't know about gorgeous, but I've seen lots of drop-dead websites. As in websites that cause my browser to "drop dead" and my CPU fan to whir like it is about to fly away.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
omg, it might become a meg!
That's why I called it a test case. I did the math on a few other, longer memetic SWFs, such as "Hatt-baby" and "Hyakugojyuuichi" and "We Drink Ritalin". It turned out that a 2 MB vector animation rendered to pixels and compressed with H.264 Baseline or WebM would become a 20 MB video. People with monthly transfer caps on the order of 2 GB per month might not appreciate that.
Yes, and this has absolutely nothing to do with you running pre-release, debug mode software, or that you're comparing low-def YouTube videos to high-def Vimeo.
I replicated your experiment, except with Chrome 5 (the release version) in Ubuntu: Vimeo and YouTube in flash (standalone plugin), at the same time. With the CNN ROV stream from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on my other monitor. So that's three video streams, and according to top npviewer.bin (the flash plugin) is taking around 70% CPU time. With just the CNN live stream it's around 8%.
So yeah, PEBKAC.
Flash itself is really very clever. The player packs an incredible amount of functionality into a very tiny executable. It's only 1.83MB. There's an animation engine, a JIT compiler, a video player, an audio system, and a multichannel download manager.
The problem is what people use it for. Which is mostly either ads or lame web sites.
Nobody really bothers doing Flash animations as entertainment much. If you've never seen one, check out Thugs on Film. Flash games remain popular, although Shockwave, which has full 3D capability, is a far better game platform. Many console games use Flash for 2D interface elements, typically using Adobe's authoring tools but a non-Adobe player. (Yes, there are non-Adobe Flash players.)
But it's not Adobe's fault that the content sucks.
This won't happen very quickly, but if HTML5 is basically capable of doing about everything Flash can, then I expect that Adobe will eventually just phase out the Flash player? Why? They don't make a nickel off the player - only the tools. Adobe has always been about the tools. While it will probably take some work to convert them, their developer tools should, it would seem like, be able to be modified to output HTML5+JS instead of Flash.
They can keep making money on having the best developer tools, while not having the costs of maintaining Flash.
There is one counter-argument, though, which might be persuasive to Adobe's management - they might not like being in a position of being 'just another vendor' in a level playing field where any company can develop HTML5 development tools. The control they have over Flash player does mean that they can kind of lock developers into their tools, instead of using someone else's tools.
Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see how this unfolds.
Designers HATE Flash. HTML stems from traditional typography layout languages. Designers have been used to and comfortable with that format for over 5 decades. Flash is NOT a designer-friendly environment. It's a motion graphics and video editing-friendly environment... if it's friendly at all. Flash was made popular by the geek teen crowd for making crude animations, and has been picked up by some websites, which more-often-than-not, use it in garashly over-elaborate ways. It's a hack. That's all there is to it. It's buggy, it has compatability issues, and often slows down or prevents users from accessing content that they could have just as easilly gotten with HTML.
As long as I've been a designer and a user, I've hated Flash. I've crossed my fingers from over 5 years ago and hoped that it wouldn't catch on. Thankfully, most of the big sites stay away from it, and that is a credit to their sense of simplicity in design. Flash is just too unstructured.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Since Apple makes software, perhaps they should actually make some relevant software here.
They could turn all of the web developer's heads and make them forget all about Flash.
That's assuming they've actually got the chops for it and don't have complete contempt for developers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Perhaps you missed it before, but Microsoft is very much interested in backing HTML5
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Reason No. 1: Flash's sub-pixel resolution and anti-aliasing: Seriously?
From TFA:
The spec does allow floating point numbers, but the numbers between the integers tend to be ignored or rounded off in a slightly different way by different browsers.
The solution, then, would be to improve the way browsers handle this. Besides, why are you doing pixel-based layouts anyway?
For reason number two, TFA says:
Some browsers are fast and some are slow. Some operations are quick on one browser and sluggish on another.
That's being worked out, and again, there's choice. With Flash, some things are quick on one OS/driver combination, and slow on another.
To make matters more complicated, not every browser implements every feature in exactly the same way, a problem that shouldn't be surprising to JavaScript developers. There are good efforts to simplify this with intermediate libraries like Processing.js, but even these can't handle every combination.
Not for long. Flash is something which attempts to be cross-platform, as in, works on Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, etc. Browsers are a hell of a lot more similar than OSes. If Flash can do it, JavaScript libraries should have a much easier time of it.
The author flat-out admits this:
Flash isn't immune to the complexity brought to us by the proliferation of operating systems and browsers, but it has been dealing with them for much longer. When the Flash plug-in doesn't crash, the results are slicker, smoother, and more consistent.
And of course, sometimes, the Flash plug-in crashes. And anywhere but Windows, the results are certainly not slicker or smoother. And nobody's mentioned SVG.
Point #3 I'll give them, but TFA also mentions:
Adobe is hedging its bets and building HTML5 support into Dreamweaver so that you can continue to use Adobe's tools and enjoy the flexibility.
And I wouldn't doubt there will be other tools just as good or better.
Point #4 -- totally agree. I'm always annoyed when I see Flash-ified headers, just to get the fonts right.
Reason No. 5: Flash is write once, play everywhere: More like write once, play anywhere that runs Flash.
Whereas HTML is write once, play everywhere that has a decent web browser -- for which you have multiple options.
Reason No. 6: The Flash commercial ecosystem: Ok. I don't know if this is an actual benefit, or if you lose more support through being semi-closed than you gain by having some commercial support.
In fact, I'd call it a detriment -- why would I go for a proprietary photo viewer over an open one? It's not like my website is just a photo viewer, is it?
Reason No. 7: Flash's game engines: I don't get it. Why is he talking about "Born to Run"?
#7 is a joke. He's just saying if JavaScript wants to be taken seriously, someone should make a JavaScript game "engine" and call it an engine, instead of a library.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet."
Who cares about "drop-dead gorgeous"? Can someone show me a site using Flash for its major content, that isn't totally f@#($ing God-awful?
Major uses of Flash today, as I see them:
Anything else? As soon as HTML5 is well-supported, I can't see any good use of Flash besides games, and even there I imagine that HTML5 will make inroads.
My bicyles
HTML5 does not have the capability to access the webcam and the microphone on the desktop. That is a pretty serious problem considering the number of people who use this feature regularly.
The other MAJOR "feature" that Flash has is that it can be installed as a plugin in pretty much *any* browser - so if you are stuck with using IE6 because of some enterprise app which doesn't run on anything else, it will still be possible to install the flash plugin on the browser - that makes Flash far more ubiquitous that HTML5 can ever hope to be in the next 5 years.