Slashdot Mirror
The Surprising Statistics Behind Flash and Apple
Barence writes "PC Pro's Tom Arah has dug up some statistics that cast severe doubt over Steve Jobs' assertion that Flash is the technology of the past, and Apple's iOS is the platform of the future. He quibbles with Net Applications' assertion that iOS growth is 'massive,' considering that mobile accounts for only 2.6% of web views, and the iOS share stands at only 1.1%. By comparison, Silverlight penetration now stands at 51% while 97% of web surfers have Flash installed, according to Stat Owl. 'At least when Bill Gates held the web to ransom he had the decency to first establish a dominant position,' Arah claims. 'In Steve Jobs' case, with only 1.1% market share, the would-be emperor isn't even wearing any clothes.'"
He's not holding the web at ransom, he's holding iPhone and iPad users at ransom, because they are the only people this really hurts (or helps).
Except it's Stevie, so he's not making any compromises.
There is some merit to his position, by the way, but it may be at Apple's expense (depending on how much $$$ Adobe wants to license Flash)
It's not a question of how great cool or widespread the Flash technology is in general.... its a question more of cost and how suitable the implementations are available for the iOS devices.
If most Flash apps won't work anyways, there's no point in allowing a broken framework, instead of pushing the next greatest standard.
It's risky, but if Flash is not suitable for mobile platforms it WILL be a thing of the past.
The question I would have is --- why is the article presenting skewed numbers, and including PC and Netbook users?
Netbook users may be more comparable to iPad users; but it's totally ridiculous to pit PC users against iOS users, and say a technology used on the web for PC users is suitable for mobile browsing
On the other hand, Steve Jobs was right. This is a bigger problem for Adobe. Let them admit thet they need some help wit Flash...maybe Linus hackers can help out.
Bottom line: Flash sucks on Android big time.
I'm really curious how Silverlight got to 51% unless it's a default install for Windows 7 or something of the sort. So far I've only seen it in the wild three times: Photosynth, the Feynmann Lectures (posted by MS...), and some random video at MSNBC or similar news site. I don't even really know what it does, so how is it at 51%? I'm really not trolling; I'm genuinely curious.
And to generalize a bit, what do statistics like this actually say? I promise you my parents don't know what Flash is, although they've probably seen plenty of irritating animated ads. The numbers they quote for Apple and Flash are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but based on their numbers for Silverlight versus the apparent usage of Silverlight, I'm having a tough time deciding what to take away from this article.
And the statistic is highly misleading anyway. Saying that 97% of computers can run Flash doesn't tell the whole story.
First, a lot of us use tools like click2flash that report themselves AS Flash, but are NOT Flash. Why do we do this? Because we got fed up with all the idiotic Flash-based adds that make buzzing sounds at random in background windows and make us jump straight out of our chairs. These people have Flash and put up with it when necessary, but generally avoid it. Those folks are difficult to distinguish from actual Flash "users", yet they suffer a degraded experience on Flash-heavy sites, and are less likely to come back.
Second, people have Flash largely because it came preinstalled. I don't know of anyone who has actually gone out of their way to install Flash. This means that those statistics could change on a dime.
Third, it assumes that all people use the web equally. For some sites, iOS-based devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) make up as much as 11% of their traffic by volume. When it comes to ad revenue, the ratings don't matter. The share matters. It doesn't matter if they make up only 1% of the total number of Internet-equipped devices. What matters is their percentage of the traffic.
Fourth, it ignores the assumption that people buying iPads and iPhones are more likely to have disposable income than people buying a random Windows PC. Thus, for many advertisers, one iPhone user is equivalent to several netbook users. Once you understand that, suddenly even a 1% share becomes much more significant, and a 10% share becomes a showstopper.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Silverlight may be a Microsoft product, but it is way better than Flash on my OS X machine. MS may be some sort of boogyman, but they managed to do with Silverlight what Adobe has failed or can't be bothered to do with Flash - make it work well on something other than Windows, which is amusing since I didn't think MS would care about making it work well on the Mac. Certainly less than Adobe should care about decent flash performance.
Not too worried about HTML5 'filling the void' myself. NoScript covers a large number of the potentially obnoxious uses already. The same techniques used for blocking Flash object/embed elements can be trivially extended to canvas, video and audio elements. CSS animations can be manipulated in the DOM (or at load time) to either strip them out completely, remove unconstrained animations, or toggle them on and off.
Better yet, though, video and audio elements can just have autoplay disabled. The asset can begin to download, so you don't need to wait, but there's no way for some fuckface web designer to decide their choice about when the video plays trumps yours; no more videos starting up in two or three tabs at once. Very hard to do with Flash, very easy to do with a video element.
It's super easy to have 97% installation base when the IT guys behind MOST of the Fortune 500 bundle them in their Windows desktop builds and some of the most highly-visited web sites out there (YouTube, a few news sites, a couple of amazing porn sites, etc) still require Flash. Same goes for Silverlight (though Microsoft bundled that in Windows Update, so its numbers should be higher).
HTML5 video isn't there yet. For starters, Firefox doesn't support H.264, which is the de facto video streaming codec at the moment. Even if it wasn't, Theora doesn't hold a candle to it and seems to be in the middle of growing pains. VP8 is coming, but it isn't here yet. HTML5 YouTube doesn't work all the way yet. Worse still, differences in CPU performance with HTML5 when compared to Flash have been shown to be negligible. (In fact, some of the stats on that page show that Flash 10.1 is more efficient with its CPU utilization.) Worst, and most importantly, of all, tons upon tons of people are still on IE6, which doesn't support HTML5.
I think we all agree that, on paper, HTML5 is a great idea and will do more to unite a powerful web experience with the convenience of mobile computing. In practice, however, it's still very nascent and will take a while before it supplants Flash, et. al. And I guarantee you that Adobe will be on top of that (unless they're stupid and become a numb bystander to their own death).
Are there any major differences between Google's or Mozilla's HTML5 proposals and Apple's, besides video?
No real major differences, but a load of minor proprietary webkit extensions to CSS.
no webdev, even the very incompetent ones, will write HTML that only works for less than 10% of viewers.
O rly? There's a ton of stuff which target the iPad and nothing but the iPad. It kinda feels like the good old days of IE6.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.