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.'"

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Re:Browser as Gaming Platform

[Kitkoan]

Did you see the video of that Quake 2? It has major frame rate drops (and I doubt it was running on specs from 5 years ago) and took many elements beyond html5 to do that (in their words "we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets"). So many extras means more problems to support on different OS's. They also stated that they needed to create a new WebGL based renderer, not the standard one. Now go try Quake Live which is running Flash. Its recommended (not minimum) specs are: 2 GHz Intel Processor or better, 1680x1050 or higher screen size (can be as low as 1024x600), NVIDIA GeForce 7 Series or better, ATI Radeon X1800 series or better. These specs would run on a computer from 5 years ago without the frame rate drops and all the extras (including a custom built WebGL renderer). And the graphic load is more for Quake Live then Quake 2. Now are you really trying to tell me that the choppy, customized Quake 2 that most likely took quite modern hardware to run at even that level of "smoothness" is somehow proof that the Flash version of Quake Live (Quake 3) that runs smooth, without customized extras on hardware that is 5 years old is the proof that Flash is dying and ready to be replaced by the standard HTML5?