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Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away
CWmike writes "While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted, say industry analysts. 'There are many people who despise Flash, but I'm not sure they'd love the alternative right out of the gate. The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,' Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.' Here are six factors that give Flash a strong position over HTML 5 and other alternative Web media technologies in the foreseeable future. For starters, While Android has made Flash a wedge issue, Flash is just beginning to show up on multiple mobile device platforms, Wen writes. Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages, but Craig Barberich, vice president of marketing and business development at Coincident TV, highlights the pervasiveness of Flash on the Web as we know it: 'Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked about is a lot of the interactive elements.'"
1. The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.
2. Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.
3. Adobe provides strong tools and support for designers and developers.
4. Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers.
5. Flash remains popular with online advertisers.
6. HTML 5 still has video codec patent issues to work out.
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It's not HTML5, it uses WebGL which is not supported by IE, for example.
Nokia (yeah, remember Nokia?) is working on QTQuick and QML: a Qt/Javascript/CSS fusion language. (Formerly called Kinetic, now called QtQuick, and QML (the JS/CSS language)
It does everything that Flash does and is completely open source. What's more is it is not byte-code interpreted. The QML file is loaded into the QtDeclarativeEngine and evaluates and runs in native code. (Aside from Javascript, but Apple isn't arguing about JavaScript use)
*FULLY* open source, not interpreted (beyond JS), And damn easy to use... It will be a part of Qt 4.7 (next month?)
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Having used Flash on Android (it sucks), I'd say Flash on iOS isn't about control, it's about evolving user experience.
You're right that Flash is easy to pick up and the tools are mature, but that's because Flash was only ever designed for one thing: desktop multimedia presentations, composited wholesale by the CPU, operated with keyboard and mouse, driven by a time-line. This makes it easy to make something quick, but it also results in monolithic components that are a pain to deal with for everyone else.
Even if you disregard battery-life, there are a bunch of user experience problems that need to be addressed to get Flash working on mobile. The biggest one is that touch requires smart/heuristic input to deal with fat fingers, to disambiguate gestures and to deal with limited screen real-estate.
In making the iPhone, Apple delivered (arguably) the first usable mobile browser, and they did so by changing many of the rules of how webpages are used... you use contextual touches, you zoom in/out, you use form selectors in isolation, the chrome auto-hides, videos are played fullscreen, etc. And surprisingly, they were able to do this without requiring existing webpages to change, by leveraging HTML/CSS' transparent, descriptive nature. Then, they just added a bunch of simple APIs to JavaScript to expose the various mobile/geo features. Suddenly, iOS was the most attractive web platform around.
To do the same to Flash would've been a huge endeavor and wouldn't change the fact that most Flash content simply doesn't work well on mobile. Plus, Apple would've had to work with Adobe on this... i.e. the company that has refused to make a decent Flash player for OS X for years. Good riddance, we'll manage with JavaScript and Canvas just the same.