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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.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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
It's not HTML5, it uses WebGL which is not supported by IE, for example.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.)
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?
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
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.