Enough already. I’ve been asked a number of times what I think about Flash beeing killed by HTML 5 and I’m really getting tired of the whole discussion (which to begin with is not very interesting). That’s why I’m writing this down in a post so as to spare me from answering the same dull question once and for all.
Those seeking a quick answer to whether HTML 5 is going to kill Flash, the answer is: “No”. A slightly longer answer would go: “No, but I hope it did”.
iPhones, iPads
So the iPhone and the iPad does not support Flash, and quite likely never will. So what? At the time of writing there is no single mobile phone to be bought by consumers that support a full Flash experience (to me that is Flash 10 within the browser). So, if there’s no single mobile phone today that supports the Flash experience, how come Flash is still alive? The mobile web is still different from the desktop web, and it’s going to stay that way for a while still. People use the mobile web for different purposes and I really don’t think that to this day many have missed Flash on their mobile devices. The iPad is a different story, as the experience and use scenarios come close to the desktop web. But I think that the absence of Flash on the iPad is Apple’s loss, not Adobe’s.
Video
Whenever a major newspaper with inexperienced tech journalists write about how Flash is being killed by HTML they always refer to the video embedding capabilities of the spec. And nothing else really. Somehow someone has been able to seed the perception that Flash = web video. Within that false perception, HTML5 might actually kill Flash (in the distant future). Somebody will create a fantastic plug-in for jQuery UI that puts lovely controls around all video tags on a page, and that will become the norm. For that to happen, however, most users on the web will need to surf on a HTML5 enabled browser. Usually “most users” refers to more than 90% of all users (after which developers can start to remove any gracious fallbacks that involve Flash). If you look at the market share of IE6, which was released ages ago, you know it’ll take a while to reach that 90%.
Silverlight
The fact that Microsoft has created Silverlight and still keeps on pushing it hard is actually a case for Flash surviving the “onslaught of HTML5″. If MS felt that they could not compete with HTML5 using a plug-in technology that is far less spread than the Flash Player, they would not pour millions of dollars into it’s R&D. Nuff’ said.
But I wouldn’t mind if it did kill Flash
On the other side of this argument are Flash developers, screaming out loud things like “To arms! Flash is under attack”. WTF? Let’s imagine that HTML5 (or whatever else) would actually kill Flash.
For this to happen, there would need to be a technology or language that would be widespread amongst internet users, embraced by developers and thus superior to whatever it is that Flash is doing now. Metathesiophics (people who fear change, yes I had to look that up) aside, wouldn’t that be great? Whatever comes along, it’s bound to be programmable by something which reminds us (or is) of ECMA-Script or Java, so there’s really no steep learning curve for any Flash developer, especially as change does not come overnight, but over many years (sad but true).
So yeah, I hope something kills of Flash really quickly.
Simon Bromfield 23:34 on March 12, 2010 Permalink |
At last, a sound a reasoned post on the subject kudos to you!