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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.'"
He wanted to drive a competitor out of the marketplace, which is easy, when you control the marketplace.
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Flash was nice when it came out.
but today it's just heavy to load, and compared to what you can do with HTML5 and CSS3 it's only advances is that it's a plug-in so people with old browsers (or browsers that do not mean that there is a point in supporting HTML5/CSS3) can see advance web grafic, and play online browser games
a San Francisco-based company that sells what it calls a "platform-agnostic" framework that allows its clients to create video with interactive elements that can be experienced on either the iOS-based devices or devices that run Flash.
So it works on iOS too. Which means it works without Flash. Chances are it's HTML 5, so it will work in every other modern browser too. Problem solved.
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Two words. "Browser Games" I play Deepolis, a very responsive and media-rich game. Can't imagine it implemented in anything other than Flash. It's the same reason many linux people have dual-boot. Games.
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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I think Flash will stick around for at least a few more years. Actionscript has turned into a fairly nice language, and I think it will be a while yet before HTML5+Javascript match its performance and capabilities... at least for substantial web applications and games. Where HTML5 will take over, I hope, is in small 'widgets'... drop down menus, loading bars, all the tiny little flash applications that drive us crazy.
I also think that even once everything Flash does can be recreated in HTML, the more locked-down nature of Flash (at least against casual probing) may make it more tempting to companies streaming video, music, and other such products.
The biggest way to hurt Flash, I think, would be to create a nice opensource development IDE for HTML5, comparable to what Adobe gives us for Flash. If you can get kids and artists to feel comfortable creating simple drag-n-drop animations and games, you'll be legitimate competition.
I knew Flash had a certain air of suck about it because of some of the security issues. Then I went to FX's talk at BlackHat US 2010. He released a tool (Blitzableiter http://blitzableiter.recurity.com/), that essentially does all the file validation for SWF files that Adobe's Flash player Completely Fails at. I think that maybe I would feel a lot better about Adobe's position if they didn't still have, after just about 10 years, a giant kludge job that they expect us all to freely install in our browsers.
Spyder
Some of jobs reasoning was good and some was in substantial. Clearly he had some motivation to see it the way he did but that does not make the issies he raised vanish.
One of the most substantial is who gets to set the common denominator. If you innovate a new feature in your device, say haptic response, and flash does not support it, you are sort of at the mercy of adobe.
Conversely, of course is the embrace and extend effect we all know and hate. Internet Explorer defined the web non-standards and held things back. People wrote to the IE specific features and things borke on standards based browsers. Flash currently lets you do more than open standards do particularly in the area of DRM, advertising, paid content and feedback to the server. As a result people who need that will write for it. People for whom it is the easiest way to implement something, say bank security, will use it. It will be has hard to get rid of as IE.
Meanwhile as I said, while extending in some ways it will homogenize the device capabilities an limit innovation in that realm.
Since Apple has a history of bringing new features to devices early and depricating old ones early, they are right to see flash as harmful to them.
But from the point of view of taming a lot of different phone manufactured tweaked versions of Android or Symbian or windows 7, or simply writing cross platform flash is going to win unless the standards catch up soon.
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Flash is the savior of the universe. Sending it away would be ungrateful. Flash aaah aaah ahh.
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There are a couple of easily debunked arguments :
The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.
Exactly 1 single other platform : Android.
All the rest are only promises for some time in the future.
Meanwhile, HTML5 is an open standard meaning that everyone is free to implement it, including opensource implementations like Webkit and Gecko, and closed source like Opera's Presto and... huh... well... maybe IE's engine. Some day. Eventually.
But it's already available today on a huge number of platform and could be implemented on any new platform withouth needing to wait for Adobe to agree to port it.
Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.
You know what ? So are HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript.
Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers.
And is a total joke. RTMPE doesn't even use a secret to encrypt the streams, only some publicly available data and scrambling. Read about it in the Analysis section of RTMPdump's docs.
Even a HTTPS server serving the data stream for the VIDEO HTML5 tag could provide better protection, simply because at least non logged-in users can't get the content.
Flash remains popular with online advertisers.
Sorry ? And that's a good argument how ?
So the only good arguments in favor of Flash are :
- Video codec patents problems (and that's about to change as the "as much close to H264 as possible but with the patented bit left out" WebM format has been introduced by On2 and Google)
- Good tool suite to develop (and that's a really good argument, but could one day change if better tool for HTML5/CSS/Javascript are developed)
That's probably the single only good argument in favour of flash. If developer and artist are given nice tools they will produce content. Flash has the nicest tools, so for now, Flash is preferred by the people who create the content and thus more Flash content is created.
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Really. Is that going to happen on the year of Linux on the desktop, or the year that Duke Nukem Forever comes out?
Maybe web technology as we know it really will go away someday -- but considering I've heard someone predict that it was about to every year for the last 15 or so, I'm not holding my breath.
The basic problem is that while it's easy to criticise Flash, the available alternatives simply aren't up to the job yet, nor are they going to be any time soon.
If you're a fan of open, portable standards and advocate HTML5 and CSS over Flash, please remember how much of HTML5 and CSS3 isn't actually standardised yet. Most of these clever demo pages are based on non-portable, browser-specific CSS, which looks similar to what might one day go in CSS3 but often varies subtly between rendering engines, so the CSS files are full of almost the same styling written in three not-quite-identical ways. How is this any better than the old IE vs. Netscape problems?
For serving video, obviously one of the most important applications of Flash today, please investigate which AV formats are actually supported by which HTML5-capable browsers, including Apple's iWhatever platforms. Bonus points are awarded for identifying the universally supported formats that are not encumbered by any kind of IP issues. (Hint: There aren't any.)
This whole Flash vs. HTML5 video debate reminds me a lot of people who criticise table-based layouts on web pages. There are many genuine advantages of CSS and many genuine problems with table-based layout. However, the anti-table crowd still look pretty stupid when you're talking about some trivial page layout and they are advocating 50-line CSS solutions that work on most browsers from the past three years in preference to 5-line table-based solutions that work reliably on every browser since forever. They look even more stupid when they "justify" their position based on usability and accessibility concerns that most of them have never experienced, with implications they don't even understand.
These things are all tools. We should use the best tool for each job. Hopefully, in time, new technologies and standards will leave behind less useful tools, and Flash will either evolve to keep up or it will die. For now, if you're going to bash Flash, please make sure you have a demonstrably better alternative to suggest first. Otherwise you're just a guy ranting on a forum.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Forget what's available to users. The question was about what's actually installed on users' desktops. I assure you that almost nobody's going to try a hack like Google Chrome Frame or a Firefox simulator plug-in. (Well some people may, but they're the people who are already using HTML-5 compliant browsers.)
To the best of my understanding, this is why flash takes so much CPU processing power to play a video.
Hopefully they will be addressing this now that they're going mobile, and working on a lot of optimizations..
Check out this NetSteam class, which is used to stream videos from the internet or your hard drive:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/NetStream.html?allClasses=1
In particular, the bufferLength property reads:
"If any [thing] causes bufferLength to increase more than 600 seconds or the value of bufferTime * 2, whichever is higher, Flash Player flushes the buffer and resets bufferLength to 0"
Translation?
If flash player loads a video to the point that fills it's buffer size, it immediately flushes it's buffer and reloads the video into the buffer, and then it will flush it's buffer and reload the video into it's buffer, and then it will flush it's buffer.. etc
You can see where I am going with this. It's absurd.. but this is what appears to be going on to me.
The alternative is to set a really high buffer time, and make it so the entire video gets loaded into the buffer so the bufferLength is rarely greater than bufferTime*2. but then it will take much longer to begin playing so I doubt you have ever come across any code on the internet that actually does that..
I became aware of this when I was using flash to load a video on my local hard drive and received hundreds of buffer flush events.. one after another, after another, after another.
Having said all that, I think Flash has a lot of things going for it.. It just needs a little work still..
Adobe is obviously trying, but I think the talent is spread too thin. Some of their flash classes are written really well and some are written really poorly.
Otherwise, Flashblock will stop working and all those ads and banners and devil-may-care craziness will be UNSTOPPABLE.
Seriously, how can I strip out HTML5 content that I hate? What plugin can tell what should stay and what should go? Flash is the best thing ever for people who want to enjoy the web, because the Flash elements are easy to detect and discard before rendering.
It's not that Flash isn't still used or won't go away, it's that there is no end of things to do on my iPhone as it is. Every once in a while I run across a web site that requires flash. What do I do? I don't use it. Their loss much more so then mine. I'm not saying there aren't things out there I wish I could use on my iPhone, only that other things weigh more heavily for me, and in any case it just hasn't been a big deal. If it's some site I really want to access I'll send them a message and request that they make their site compatible with iOS and non-Flash. Sometimes they do that. Sometimes they don't. I'll live.
--- What?
It seems to me to be pretty awesome as it means my Mac doesn't sit here and boil on my laptop because Flash is chewing away CPU as fast as it can with no apparent reason.
Every other video app on my mac does fine without eating CPU, its just the awesomeness of flash that makes my laptop get hot.
I've yet to come across a reason to use flash over html5 video.
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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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But not for the obvious reasons. Flash is going the same way as all of Adobe's other software, this is a trend I first noticed about the time of Photoshop 8 (ooh, history brush, I'll pay for that). Adobe has no good programmers left. I don't know if they fired them all just before that time, or they bailed, but ever since then all we've seen out of them is mediocre point upgrades. They're still living off the reputation they built in the mid 90s.
Their shit just plain doesn't work, or is old codebases patched into oblivion, and they either don't want to, or can't hire people talented enough to fix and improve it.
two reason why flash *should* die:
1. spyware
2. malware
i really don't care if flash has better optimised code right now, and can play videos faster. even ignoring the fact that my CPU and GPU are more than capable of playing any kind of video without breaking a sweat, it's far more important to me that my computer NOT run arbitrary, untrusted code from any web site i visit that either spies on me or tries to install malware like keystroke-loggers or spambots (fortunately, i'm fairly safe from the latter as i run only linux - it's more offensive than dangerous).
i know that i'm taking a stupid risk every time i allow noscript and flashblock to play a flash video, so i try to avoid it...and will keep doing so until HTML5 videos are the standard. data is (mostly) safe[1]. arbitrary executable code is not.
(i really don't think i'm missing much - youtube and the like are, after all, subject to Sturgeon's Law like everything else)
i still think the most appropriate analogy to describe web users running arbitary code from web sites they visit is to say it's like jabbing yourself with every needle on the ground as you walk by a junkie squat - you might enjoy some kind of a high, but you'll certainly get infected. it's why i use NoScript and only allow sites i trust to execute javascript....and give up immediately on sites that don't work at all without js....web sites should degrade gracefully and still work in basic form without scripting, even if it is a more primitive "experience" than what you get if you allow scripts to run.
[1] maliciously created data files could cause a buffer overflow or something in the player - but the code for that is under MY control, not the web sites'. it can be fixed ONCE and protect my computer from all future attempts to exploit the same bug.