Editors Note: This is a guest post by Carlos Nazareno, an interactive media artist with a great deal of flash experience. He felt he had an interesting take on the Flash vs. HTML 5 saga and we agreed, we hope you will too.
When Apple unveiled the iPad in January, its glaring lack of support for the Flash browser plug-in ignited heated HTML5 vs. Flash discussions. At the heart of the debate is the idea Flash will become obsolete as HTML5 duplicates much of its functionality. As a developer who works with the Flash platform, I’d like to point out a few things about this new Mac vs. PC-esque debate that just won’t quit.
The Web is ruled by designers not developers.
What HTML5 promises to bring is the rich interactive web in the future: the same whiz-bang object animation, tweening effects, and video that have long been the domain of Flash. One thing anti-Flash proponents have to realize however is that the web is ruled by designers who don’t know how to code, and that programmatic animation and rich UI coding is no easy task. Unless someone comes up with a unified toolset that will give these designers the same ability to produce timeline and tweened animations, in-app vector graphic manipulation, multi-channel sound integration and nested movieclip objects in HTML5 with the same ease currently being accomplished in Flash Pro, don’t expect Flash to disappear anytime soon.
Interestingly, as Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch explains, it looks like that someone is going to be Adobe. Remember: Adobe is in the business of selling tools. They don’t make money directly with Flash itself; they make money off the tools that create Flash content. If HTML5 is where the future is headed, then that’s simply where Adobe will go.
The HTML5 video tag: will it be the final nail in Flash’s coffin?
One of the upcoming features of HTML5 which is touted to be a Flash killer is the new tag. Pundits say that Flash will die now that people will be able to natively play videos on their browsers without having to install plugins. This is great for the open web, but there’s a big problem that has brought this feature to a standstill: browser vendors cannot agree on which codec the video tag will support.
Firefox, Opera and Chrome support the open and royalty-free Ogg Theora/On2 VP3 codec, while Safari, Internet Explorer 9 and again, Chrome supports the newer H.264 which needs to be licensed. Here’s the big problem: although Ogg Theora is free, it’s not as efficient as H.264; Google’s Chris DiBona stated that if YouTube were to use Theora as its codec, it would take up most of the available bandwidth of the internet. On the other hand, Mozilla has flat-out refused to license and use the H.264 codec because it would violate the principles of free software and would become the GIF patent problem all over again. Because of this disagreement on which video format to use, HTML5 has once again brought us to same the problem in the 90′s where websites would serve videos in various incompatible formats like Real Media, ASF, WMV, DivX, Quicktime and so on. This is the exact same environmental condition on which made Flash Video took off in the first place: Flash Video simply worked hassle-free on just about every browser out there.
Now that we have established that the HTML5 video tag won’t get anywhere unless vendors can agree on a codec, do note that flash video can also be used in ways that can’t be easily achieved in HTML5 yet like:
- video conferencing (voice and video)
- live audio/video recording
- video rotation and usage as a surface on a 3D object
- overlaying dynamic objects over the video like subtitles, closed captions, or video game characters
- using multiple videos overlayed on background images and stitched seamlessly together to make animated virtual persons or what have you
Games, games, games!
Aside from video, websites, interactive CD/DVD-ROMs and kiosks, one of Flash’s other big guns is games. Consider this: Sony has sold 33.5 million Playstation 3 units, Microsoft moved 40 million X-Box 360 units and Nintendo 70.93 million with the Wii. Farmville alone has 82.4 million active users. If you think of all the Flash games out there and the number of people playing them, then Flash is now actually one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world!
That’s all well and good for browser gaming, but now, with the arrival of the HTML5 canvas element on the scene, game developers can now do the same things in HTML5 that Flash games are doing, right? After all, with HTML5 we can now do all sorts of neat stuff like this sweet space shooter game and even run ID Software’s classic Quake II 3D game! With this in mind, DHTML will supplant Flash as the medium for creating casual browser games, surely?
Well, not just yet. Flash has so many things going for it right now that can’t be easily replicated in HTML5:
- Byte-level preloading. Preloaders are important so that users know there is progress happening while your game is in a loading state. HTML5 only does this on a per object loaded basis and not with byte-level accuracy which provides better feedback for waiting users.
- Timeline animation and tweening: this is one of Flash’s biggest assets for game developers. Sprite & background animation has never been so easy!
- You can easily roll out your Flash games in convenient single-file SWF packages which you can then distribute to various game portals that will license the game from you or maybe publish it as an AIR file for sale on the Adobe AIR Marketplace or even get ‘em featured on Valve’s Steam!
- Multi-touch and gesture support which can be pretty cool for certain games and applications
- Reading of raw webcam pixel data which will give you the ability to do something like Sony’s EyeToy
- Peer to peer networking – I’m really looking forward to this for multi-player Flash games.
- True, there are Flash decompilers out there, but viewing an HTML5 game’s sourcecode in a browser is so much easier than with Flash SWFs. Moreover, even if you say Javascript can be obfuscated to prevent sourcecode stealing, you can apply that same obfuscation technique to your SWF too, so Flash still wins in this department.
- Regarding Steve & other HTML5 zealots’ arguments that Flash games aren’t made for touchscreen devices and that mouseOver events wouldn’t work: well, JavaScript faces the exact same challenges anyway. What’s the difference? Flash developers can simply retrofit their games to work on touch devices so this isn’t really a problem.
- For those who are complaining about cost as a barrier to entry on developing for the Flash platform, for coders, there are actually free and open source tools that can be used to build quality SWFs today: Sun’s JDK, the Free & Open source FlashDevelop IDE (Microsoft .NET 2.0 required) and Adobe’s Open Source Flex SDK.
- Speed speed speed: check out these particle demo benchmarks. AVM2 ActionScript 3 Flash is so much faster than current Javascript implementations.
HTML5 is here, but not quite here yet. When is it going to finally arrive?
Realize this: WHATWG, the standards group steering and dictating HTML5′s spec moves so slow that it took roughly 6 years to get to where it is today (essentially a fraction of what Flash MX could do back in 2002). Also, assuming IE6 finally dies by then (doubtful), wider-spread adoption of HTML5 by manufacturers isn’t expected ’til 2012. What’s worse, the HTML5 spec isn’t even going to be finalized until 2022! That time frame gives Flash ample time to brush up the edges that other find to be rough.
Finally, HTML5 is just as bad, if not worse than Flash.
Regarding slow and bloated Flash content, the problem is not the platform itself, but with authors who don’t know how to or simply don’t optimize content. If Flash content is developed well, there should be little to no problem with the performance hit systems will take. With every Tom, Dick & Harry website going AJAX right now, a lot of sites simply can’t be viewed efficiently by low-spec machines anymore. When surfing the web on a 400MHz OLPC XO-1 laptop (first-hand experience), certain sites with Javascript turned on like Facebook is just become plain unusable. Gone are the days when you could surf the net with a Pentium 166MMX on a dial-up connection.
Prepare for a new breed of obnoxious Javascript web ads to replace those obnoxious Flash ads once HTML5 gains traction. At least with Flash ads, you can simply use Flashblock or ClickToFlash to avoid them. As more people start using Ad blockers, expect ad companies to use more and more of these floating Javascript/CSS ads that irritatingly hijack and cover webpages you’re trying to read. also, if the page you’re viewing itself is heavily laden with Javascript code, how then are automated ad-blocking solutions going to block these ads if the content they serve lie on white-listed servers?
In closing, what do I really think about HTML5 as a Flash developer?
Well I think HTML5 is great and yes, it is the future. I don’t see it replacing Flash anytime soon though as there are too many issues holding it back and there are things going for Flash that it cannot compete with. However, unless content creators learn to optimize even on HTML5 or create mobile/lite version of their websites, I see a dystopian future where low-spec mobile devices (which is where the net is headed) will have to return to the MHz arms race in order to view the most mundane of web content. Moore’s law is not going where it should: instead of making CPUs run faster and faster, they should make CPU speeds run at “just acceptable” levels and just make them cheaper with each iteration. (Mom and Dad don’t need 3GHz machines just to use Office or surf the web!) All this MHz hungry app vs. MHz escalation will lead to is just higher power consumption, overheating and shorter battery lifespans. It’s bad for you, me the entire environment and the principles of ICT4D.
HTML5 proponents, be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.
This sounds like rationalized denial.
It’s not important to explain why most of your assumptions are wrong, because in 2-3 years you will probably see for yourself that this rationalization has nothing to do with reality.
Flash will be gone soon, whether we like it or not, whether its justified or not.
@Adam, if you find me tools that would allow me to do in html5/css/js what i can do with flex/flash, and with some comparable workload, then may be i could agree with you.
Adam, you’re a colossal twit. It’s not important for me to support that claim, because, uh, sometime in the future you’ll just out that it’s true.
I’ll just let you reel from the stunning force of my counterargument now.
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i don’t think html5 is all-ready to overtake flash. playing with flash is a far smooth experience all together! html5 has still to evolve and prove itself.
Great article Carlos.
As a Flash/Flex/Java developer, I know and feel the pain daily regarding the fact that my life is ruled by my clients designers not the developers. It’s the sexy wiz-bang functionality that everyone wants and that is driven by designers. And for the most part, designers don’t care what tech stack is used.
For some more wonderful insight, read Jesse Wardens thoughts. Like you and I, he’s fairly technology agnostic. Just get the job done. It’s really time for the Jobian hysteria to go away. Silly scared man.
http://jessewarden.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-on-flash-correcting-the-lies.html
Good points, and I agree with most. But your initial point is a lot of BS.
| The Web is ruled more by designers than not developers.
Complete and utter crap. Designers might make the pretty (or not so) face you see but it is developers who build the web. I would like to see designers serving pages without, oh I dunno Apache. Ain’t gonna be much of a web without developers building the software which handles the requests.
And am sure the web would function just fine as a series of static pages. Who needs interactivity anyways? No comments, no uploads, no user accounts. Just static HTML. Ok, it might be very pretty, but it ain’t going to do anything.
To be honest deigners are not really necessary in the process. Google is pretty successful, and their products all look like they were designed by engineers ;)
I think the point was that the web is ruled more by the desires of designers than developers, not the actions. Obviously developers actually build things, but clients come to the designers, who come to the developers to build whatever thing they want. The designer is typically higher in that hierarchy (depending on the type of product, obviously).
(I say this as a Flash developer/designer of 10 years, who’s sat in both the Designer and Developer seat; the designer tells the developer what they want)
I have to concur with what Brian has said. I’ve done web design
off and on for about 10 years myself. I actually started out as just
a commercial illustrator and had to adapt to survive in the design
world as a freelancer. So website building became the workable
solution. I’ve actually found that the whims of the web lay with
the people that have the least knowledge of it. I’ve been the one
in the middle of many a request between programmers and a
person or series of people that “saw something cool” on a site
somewhere and wanted that exact same thing. Except, “with more
pop to the design, and more interactivity…” I personally don’t like
Flash or many other things that require plug-ins to view. Many
of the clients I’ve done work for don’t like to spend money on new
hardware much less update any browsers they will have installed.
From my standpoint, I’d much rather have a well designed site that
would allow the maximum amount of viewers to see it without any
issues, and I try and bring that to the table. But without fail, I am
9 out of 10 times undone by someone who knows nothing about
web design or how bandwidth, loading times, or anything about
what actually makes a site work from a server side.
Great post. Flash would never go soon.
Aaron, if you’re working with advertising agencies, they are somewhat interested in the possible functionalities a certain technique offers but by enlarge they want you to just make what they had their creatives come up with and these guys just don’t give a lot of attention to technique (html5 or flash). Just get it done is the overruling motto. So I think the author does have a valid point here.
The letter jobs wrote is about HTML5 on mobile devices!
Mobile devices don’t have the battery power to have multiple layers of program code and compiliers to process bytecode. I think it’s a wise decision to skip Flash, back in the days my mobile phone could last a whole week instead of 1 or 2 days….
Comparisons between HTML5 and Flash (linked in the article) already show that HTML5 uses way more CPU than Flash on desktops. So there’s no reason to think HTML5 won’t eat battery faster than Flash.
I agree that the flash authoring tool isn’t going anywhere soon, it’s a great editor for animations; The fact that they have the beginnings of support for HTML5 output seems to indicate Adobe’s feeling on the matter.
The truth is, it isn’t really about the medium, so long as the end-user get’s all their flashy content.
Once adobe fully supports HTML 5, we might find ourselves with an ecosystem of visual authoring tools for HTML 5 animation (including tweening).
Great post, Carlos! This is an excellent review and it should be helpful to better explain the situation to the designers in our group that are adamant about HTML5 over Flash but really don’t understand the technical issues or web landscape in general.
Did anyone proof read this article? What a mess.
Yeah, there’s a number of typos that weren’t caught :-/ Sorry about that, guys! That’s the effect of writing a blog post at ungodly hours
” the same whiz-bang object animation, tweening effects, and video that have long been the domain of Flash” – Gee, anyone thought of the fact that we just don’t need (or want) all that whiz-bang crap and that we just want information? GOOD. I HOPE a lot of the “tweening effects” and crap go away finally.
I hope Adobe does make great HTML5 tools. Especially the Animation tools. This debate is a bit tiring. The web is still in its infancy, the best tools will win in the end. Designers may rule the web. But Clients only pay for working solutions. Id the solution doesn’t work designers don’t get paid. And at the end of the day that is all this is about.
Good article, although I don’t agree with some points.
- The Web is ruled more by designers than not developers.
You’re partly right here. But don’t forget that Flash designers/developers use actionscript to power a big part of the Flash application. Flex is even more so. When a designer doesn’t know how to code, his Flash applications are quite limited.
- Finally, HTML5 is just as bad, if not worse than Flash.
With simple animations, it’s definitely better to use HTML. It’s much quicker to load some plain code than a big binary piece of Flash.
This is the opinion of a developer =)
You’re a developer and you think HTML5 animations load faster than Flash? What do you think is in that “big binary” piece? I’ll tell you: the exact same images, sounds and scripts you would use with HTML5. The main difference is that the flash version has been (basically) gzipped, which makes a pretty big difference for the scripts.
Great post.
I agree with most of your points but if Apple doesn’t support Flash then that may hasten its death. HTML5 will be the standard for developing content and ads simply because it will work in more places then Flash. The new content may not be as advanced as Flash content yet, but it will be enough for the transition period.
As far as game, I think Flash will still have a place for creating games for Desktop browsers but on mobile devices I think developers are going to create native apps because they will be easier to sell and will likely perform better.
So, Flash is not dead on the desktop but its never going to take off on mobile.
What I’m more excited about is not Flash 10.1 on mobile, but Adobe AIR 2.0. http://www.adobe.com/products/air -> Think of AIR as something like a new kind of Java .JAR package. They’re essentially Flash apps that have been taken out of the browser sandbox to interact with a system’s native APIs.
Since AIR 2.0 is coming to Android, Blackberry, Palm, WinMo & Symbian, they’ll be like Apple iPhone apps that’ll run on every new smartphone except Apple’s once AIR becomes available to all those phones. What’s more, these same apps built on AIR will run on Windows, Mac & Linux! It’s Java’s vision of Write Once-Run Anywhere come true!
I’d recommend that mobile devs start building AIR apps for mobile (meaning, optimize). The Apple App store is now too inundated with apps that it’s hard to get people to notice your new iPhone app. The barrier to entry on the AIR marketplace on the other hand, is very low. It’s not saturated yet so anyone who comes up with a decent game would have a very high chance to get noticed on that platform.
Adobe, if you’re listening, take a good look at what made the app store successful, take a look at its flaws/complaints, then apply those lessons to the AIR Marketplace/Shibuya and turn it into an ecosystem that will attract developers and sell phones.
Flash is now one of the largest gaming platfoms in the world. If Adobe does the AIR Market right, think the win-win situation for developers & customers where authors of the best flash games bring ‘em to your mobile phone as optimized semi-native apps (as opposed to web apps that always need an internet connection)
“Adobe, if you’re listening, take a good look at what made the app store successful, take a look at its flaws/complaints, then apply those lessons to the AIR Marketplace/Shibuya and turn it into an ecosystem that will attract developers and sell phones.”
Have been. Goal is less a centralized marketplace than a diversity of marketplaces, where developers and their audiences can easily meet as each sees fit. More news as the devices and services advance.
jd/adobe
This has been one of the best posts I’ve read about this topic. Good job. As an avid supporter of flash and a big fan of HTML and where it can take us, I agree with many of your points here. Thanks for showing both sides of the coin and bringing to light the truths that many would like to over look in support of their argument and or business decisions.
If Flash is so important to the mobile web, why isn’t it available still after selling tens of millions of mobile devices? The “Flash won’t go away soon” meme is irrelevant. Cobol isn’t going away soon. The question is whether it is going away on sites that matter, and it is. It isn’t even on Android! How is Flash necessary when the people who claim it is necessary are selling products that don’t support it?
Flash is done on the mobile web. Flash will be around on the web for sites that cater to desktops exclusively, and those sites will decline over time. So yes, Flash isn’t going away soon, but it is passe nonetheless.
Uh, Flash is on well over a billion mobile devices. If Apple devices are so important, why do they sell so poorly compared to Symbian (which supports Flash)?
Correction: Flash LITE is available on many mobile devices.
General-release, full Flash is available on exactly ZERO smartphones today. No Blackberries, No Androids, No Palms, No Nokias, no WindowsMobiles and obviously, No Apples. Something around a half billion smartphones that don’t run Flash.
I don’t doubt that Moore’s Law and Adobe’s talented engineers will eventually close the gap. Simply talking about today. But the great majority of today’s phones will never get it.
And while we’re at this great 10.1 that’s coming REAL SOON NOW!!! — Adobe is focusing on the Google Nexus as its poster child, but seven months after its introduction, it lacks Flash. That’s a LIFETIME in internet years, because Google has already deprecated the Nexus, telling customers to look at the HTC Incredible. What phone manufacturer is going to put its business into the hands of Adobe given this type of critical delays?
Uh, more denial. Flash Lite is not Flash, and Symbian users are not heavy internet users. The “real internet” devices where people actually use their browsers heavily do not have full Flash support. What does that tell you? So on the one hand the Flash advocates say it is so rich that we gotta have it, but then say “oh well Flash Lite is on Symbian now”, which isn’t a rich environment at all is it?
mark, I’m not making a religious argument, I’m correcting incorrect claims. To continue in that vein, Flash Lite is indeed Flash – version 3.1 is basically equivalent to Flash 8. They use exactly the same contents. The differences are chiefly in rendering subtleties like Saffron and vector caps and whatnot, which can’t really be seen on a small screen.
Moreover, FL isn’t on Symbian “now”, it’s been there for years. People in the US haven’t noticed much because it’s only recently that your phones have started getting capable of serious web browsing, but in Europe and especially Korea/Japan people have been using mobile Flash since well before the iPhone launched. The US never really developed a mobile content ecosystem, flash or otherwise – it went from no mobile browsing to browsing PC contents on mobiles – but that’s not what happened everywhere.
While we’re here, I’ll add for the thing about companies not supporting Flash – basically every important mobile maker in the world except Apple is publicly committed to Flash. Google, RIM, Nokia, etc. Either they ship Flash Lite, or they’re preparing to launch 10.1 mobile, or more commonly both. It’s not on Android because it hasn’t launched yet, but there are plenty of demo videos on youtube showing it in action.
according to the W3C group, HTML 4 still isn’t REC according to the new criteria for approval. so the 2022 date really means nothing. This may be a date when all working web browsers would have to fully 100% support HTML5, meaning older web browsers would load pages about as well as a 10 year old web browser loads current pages.
There are also ad blockers that do block other types of advertising already, so that isn’t much of an argument to keep flash around. (and an odd thing to include… “Hey, its easier to block our annoying advertising if you use flash!” )
I do agree Adobe is well positioned to make their Flash development tools into hybrid HTML5 development tools. And this would be a way around the Apple App store entirely.
Apple is not saying that HTML5 will make Flash obsolete. Apple is saying that HTML5 will make Flash VIDEO obsolete. Apple is agreeing with you in a round-about way – suggesting that the all the wonderful capabilities of Flash make it overkill for a video players.
Furthermore, Apple is advocating the UNIX philosophy, given the current status trade-offs of performance, storage capacity, and battery life. The UNIX philosophy: small, efficient tools that do one thing well are better than massive jack-of-all-trades suites. In other words, your design, programmed in native web formats will outperform the Flash run-time engine. Your app, programmed in Cocoa will outperform the equivalent Flash app + Flash run-time.
Does this mean more work for you? Possibly, even probably. Trade that off against the performance gains times the number of times your design is used.
You don’t care? Apple cares! Don’t ask Apple to choose between your design and its designs.
*******************************
Another thing: I don’t buy the whole Adobe argument.
Apple has sold around 100 million iPhone OS devices. There are billions of mobile devices. Apple does not have a monopoly. Adobe claims Flash is used on 75% of websites. Who is the monopoly here?
Apple claims 200k apps and a similar number of developers. Adobe claims millions of Flash developers, and 75% of the web. Who has the monopoly here?
The 200k iPhone OS apps do not use Flash. They would have to be re-written to run on Flash devices. Does Adobe provide a tool for that? Those iPhone OS developers could use a tool that could convert a touch-centric app into a mouse-centric app. Why is Adobe ignoring this need?
On the other hand, the millions of Flash developers already own Flash, and it seems that many of them like Adobe products. Seems like they would jump all over a product that could convert Flash source code into iPhone OS compliant web standard source code. Why is Adobe ignoring this need?
I’ve disliked Flash since working on Flash MX back at CNN.com in 1999-2000. I am glad to see it go. While I agree completely that HTML 5 isn’t a viable replacement for Flash, I’d argue that aside from games, most people don’t care to see content that can’t be rendered in HTML.
If I didn’t come to your site specifically to see a web game, and I see a big Click2Flash or FlashBlock block in the middle, I’m not going to click it just to see what it is. i’m going to a different site. If I am on my smart phone (which is not an iPhone, but a Nokia N900), I’m still not going to see your Flash while I am on the go. If I am on my iPad, I’m not going to see your Flash. So on 2 of the three platforms I use to access the web, I cannot view Flash, and on the third it’s disabled by default.
I appreciate that designers like the power of Flash. But when the mind-share of the general populous concludes that not having Flash isn’t a barrier to them, then as a designer you cannot use it anymore because people won’t be able to see the content on their 300 million smart phones and their 10 million web tablets (iPad or otherwise).
It is all about the tools and this is where Adobe has a monopoly! And as with most monopolies they make lots of money and with no real competition they under invest in them.
Flash is the interactive web development environment and it has one of the steepest learning curves of anything I can imagine. Dreamweaver is THE html tool and it doesn’t directly support simple things like RSS feeds. Adobe still has not ported most of CS5 to native OSX support.
The government should be investigating Adobe’s monopoly in the creative tools category, they bought out all their serious competitors Aldus & Macromeida and killed development of completing products.
What we all need is someone to make better tools – that will advance the web more than anything else.
Re: advance the web more than anything else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lively_Kernel
Photoshop has a TONNE of competitors out there. Ditto Illustrator, Adobe’s video editing and compositing software … if you think Dreamweaver is somehow THE html tool (by which you seem to be suggesting the only one you can use), then that shows how little you know about the state of HTML-writing tools. Might I suggest TextEdit or Notepad, for example? You in no way NEED to use Dreamweaver to write HTML.
As for Flash, there are non-Adobe applications which can create Flash content. There’s an animation tool that’s notably better for creating straight-up animations than Flash is.
Where, exactly, is the monopoly on “creative tools?”
Has anyone had the thought that Apple is trying to put a fire under Adobe’s a$$ to make it work? Apple has few problems with Flash on the Mac, (Now that they had sandboxed it in Safari) They recently supplied Adobe with the API’s to access the GPU for hardware acceleration. When the iPad and other mobile devices mature it is likely that Flash will be accepted, right now they are in a race to see who will be Number One, and Apple can’t afford to be held back by Adobe, or anyone else. Concerning video playback, Flash is overkill for video. I would expect the whole codec thing to be worked out fairly quickly, after all, as you said there is a lot riding on it. Frankly, I must say, the best thing i ever did for my Mac was install ClickToFlash. After all, it’s nice to have choice. :)
The statements about video coders/decoders (“codecs”) is egregiously incomplete.
Flash supports video in 3 formats, one of which is h.264. IIRC, I have seen what I take to be a credible claim that Flash is the delivery vehicle for more h.264 video than any other mechanism. Flash also supports an older codec that’s somewhat less efficient than Ogg’s, and one whose relative performance is not known to me.
In other words, the licensing and performance issues are absolutely important in Flash. Its advantage is that if h.264 ever becomes too expensive to license, designers can quickly fall back to a much less efficient format, and lay the costs on ISPs and wireless providers.
The other incomplete statement is that while Ogg is declared royalty-free, it can never be declared to be free of trolls who might discover their patents are essential to Ogg. Of course, there are no deep pockets to defend Ogg. While it might be easy to overstate this issue, I haven’t seen anybody convincingly dismiss it as FUD, either.
[I'm not an expert here so would be happy to be be pointed to better info.]
Actually, Google just backed Ogg Theora and declared it completely patent-free. If anyoone goes submarine patent trolling after Theora, big brother Google will be there to defend it.
“Google just backed Ogg Theora and declared it completely patent-free.”
Link, if you please! A Google search found that Google was helping in an effort to put Ogg onto earlier ARM chips that lack floating-point instructions, but no declaration.
“Inquiring Minds Want to Know!” ®
Oh, btw: any lawyer and/or logician knows: absence of proof is not the same as proof of absence. That’s why courts find you “not proven guilty” instead of “innocent.”
Fears about valid patents that Ogg uses without license may be overblown, but they cannot be absolutely dismissed without exactly every patent holder renouncing any possible claim.
On the issue of CPU requirements for Flash on a smartphone: I recently saw a study showing that Flash “only” used 12% of a Mac’s CPU, a bit less of an HP’s, in one browser, but as much as ~ 50% in others such as Chrome. 12% CPU loading doesn’t look too bad, but that misses 2 key points. First, my iPhone has approximately 10% of my laptop’s CPU speed. Assuming that I want to keep my phone circuits from shutting down, and maybe with v4, even keep my twitter or FindMyFriends app running in background, maybe only 5% of a desktop’s CPU speed is available on a smartphone. In other words, stuttering, frame-dropping at best. Second, the referenced tests did not include the GPU support that Flash taps into on PCs. GPU chips can be really power-hungry; again referencing my laptop, the GPU can burn twice the power of my CPU. Net-net, Flash video on a smartphone is likely to be EXTREMELY power-hungry compared to the tiny batteries and limited CPUs. The Flash wrapper would be overhead, maybe not too bad, on top of whatever video processing actually occurs.
These are sharp challenges for Adobe in putting Flash on phones. Once you go very far from Windows, Adob’s track record for Flash implementations is rather less than perfect, regardless of Apple — think of Linux and all the smartphones that have at best only the old Macromedia Lite version. It’s an odd business decision on Adobe’s part to air its peeves with Apple in public, when they have all these vulnerabilities. (Can you imagine being a marriage counselor and having the partners walk in arguing about who has the longer list of grievances?)
I look at the iPhone and iPad and I see ground-breaking engineering to put a wonderful web experience and a whole raft of nifty apps into right-sized mobile packages. (Look up “Disruptive Technology” on Wikipedia if you don’t have time to read “The Inventor’s Dilemma.”) Missing Flash. But these gizmos are not meant to solve old purposes better; they are meant to enable new uses. (As Henry Ford is said to have famously quipped: “ask people what they wanted and they’d say, ‘faster horses.’”) And Adobe is committed to refining and spreading its graphics apps, although they got caught terribly flat-footed in trying to deal with the under-powered smartphones, with their tiny screens and, before Apple, business-only customer base.
If I were Adobe, I’d re-double my efforts to put out a really great Flash experience onto every phone but the iPhone, whereupon Apple would be forced into making it happen. The fact that they haven’t suggests that the challenge is much worse than they let on, and they’re using Apple as a scapegoat.
The real problem for flash is that 90% of it’s use is in video playback and HTML 5 can handle most of that today. Adobe’s only real hold on the web has been that everyone needs to have Flash on their system to watch video. Once that is no longer true, everyone will not have flash loaded by default and flash will die.
Nobody will mis Flash, exept for a few developers. Let’s face it: flash is a heavy load. I’m a big fan of design in general, but never liked flash sites. The flash trick only works once. As a developer it’s always shitty to learn a new language, but that’s what progress takes. Apple is trying to force this progress on the industry, which is a controversial powerplay. But they’ll probably win. Adobe can start devolping software tools for HTML5 like they do with dreamweaver and flash, so what’s the fuzz…
“General-release, full Flash is available on exactly ZERO smartphones today. No Blackberries, No Androids, No Palms, No Nokias, no WindowsMobiles and obviously, No Apples. Something around a half billion smartphones that don’t run Flash.”
Sorry but what are you talking about.. I have a HTC Desire and the browser supports flash and this is on android 2.1.. look it up.. I can view it all.. HAHAHAHA.. HO HO TEE HEE HEE.
Thanks for the update. Guess I should have qualified it as “licensed for use in the US.”
Are you using it in the UK, and/or does it have an FCC label on the back of it?
How’s Flash work? A review I saw said it was pretty rocky on most sites.
mike: that is flash lite.
“mike: that is flash lite.”
I know what flash lite is and this is not it. I can play all of the online games directly on the site like you would on a computer, use the online casino sites, watch any video on any site on the actual site, not through some app. If it’s just flash lite then howcome millions of other phones with ‘flashlite’ can’t do what this one can do?
My phone gives the full internet experience exactly the same as a desktop. On the phone it says HTC Flash Player Version 1.0 For Android with Webkit 3.1.
If i’m wrong then explain how but as far as I know the HTC desire is one of only 3 or so handsets available that can do this.
You are correct, it is somewhere inbetween Flash lite and Flash 10
“The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript® 2.0″
“The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript® 2.0″
That’s the 2 year old HTC hero you’ve mentioned, What i’ve got is a HTC Desire with the 1GHZ snapdragon and 800X480 OLED multitouch screen.. It’s a successor to the Hero/Nexus One and was released just over a month ago.
The hero was good but it doesn’t have the level of flash support the HTC desires got.
Hands on with the HTC Desire: the iPhone for Apple haters..
http://blogs.brisbanetimes.com.au/digital-life/gadgetsonthego/2010/04/30/handsonwitht13.html
Mike, I’m still curious about the “officialness” of the Flash release. Info I have shows that the Desire is only available in the US in July 2010, and not supported by any of the Big 4 providers. Then I google “Flash 1.0 Desire” and I see a bunch of instructions about root access and “alpha” versions of ROM to support it.
So again: is this a phone that is legal and/or supported in the US? Why has Adobe not touted the general release of Flash on a smartphone?
You’re all wrong (well most of you).
The web is ruled by the end users, not by us as developers or designers. Remember you are being paid by your client to design & develop sites for their customers. They are the boss.
How many of you monitor your logs to see what pages users hit and what technology they use? If you’re not you should be and you’re not doing what your paid to do.
Finally I have many friends who have switched off Flash or refuse to visit sites that rely on Flash for navigation. If it’s an e-commerse site they will go to old tech and order by phone rather than use Flash. It would be interesting to see one e-commerce site in two parts – one Flash based and one standards based, and see which one is most popular in the long run.
Sure the effects of Flash are great for the first visit. But after repeat visits you get tired of them slowing your navigation down when you just want to go about your business on the website.
@Adam, go ahead and quote a statement, then refute it.
I go to some web sites on my iPhone and get nothing. Say, DanielNYC.Com — the site of a very nice restaurant where I celebrated my birthday last year. The front page is 100% Flash, therefore, 100% useless on my, or my wife’s iPhones. So why would it NOT be nice to be able to see the content there? I, as a customer, might be a bit less likely to reserve there because it’s hard to see it, but they don’t seem to have gotten the message yet.
That doesn’t mean I blame Apple for not “allowing” Flash on the iPhone, or that I wouldn’t be happier when the site wakes up and does something else than show pompous pictures of Chef tut-tutting over oysters.
And on my MacBook, yes, ClickToFlash is a great technology. Still, the fact is: some sites use Flash and I can’t use those sites from my iPhone, which I use increasingly.
The Flash story is interesting in that Adobe fired a good share of its Flash people in 2006, while Apple was feverishly working on bringing out the iPhone. Adobe says Apple abandoned them, but I see it that Adobe abandoned the quest for the future of the web. They just didn’t have the vision that smartphones would come out, without desktop capabilities, but tremendously useful to tens or hundreds of millions of users. Pretty big miss, and they are making up for it by blaming Apple.
Sooner or later Adobe will show that Flash has a place on smartphones, putting Flash on virtually all the smartphones. That day seems pretty far into the future, and I guess your drift is that the web will have found an alternative before that day. Bring it on. But don’t claim that you have the sole insight into Truth without offering a capability rather than just stomping on the desire for the sorts of graphics, video, interactivity that Flash COULD deliver if Adobe had cared enough.
The web is moving towards more application development, not less. I don’t think many people realize just how often they’re using Flash. The ads and videos are easy to spot, and many people assume that’s the only Flash content they encounter. For example, how many people who used TurboTax online this year likely realized it was a big Flash application?
Microsoft gets it. They’re putting a lot into Silverlight right now, despite the fact that they’re promoting HTML5 in IE9. What they and Adobe realize is that the sophistication of web applications is only going to grow, and as it does, the need for bringing the advantages of mature desktop application development conveniences to the web will also grow. Javascript+HTML doesn’t sit well with a lot of programmers who are used to strongly-typed, feature rich object oriented programming languages like C# and AS3. Nor does having to worry about platform inconsistencies or maintaining the state of data as users navigate around from one page to another. With Flash and Silverlight, developers can create major applications more quickly, with fewer problems and which offer better performance. The need for this category of tools is growing right now, not diminishing.
I keep hearing that Flash is dead because HTML will replace it for video. This confuses me. My recollection is that Flash was everywhere before it ever became commonly used for video. But in any case, it seems like major players are still finding a need for Flash video. Hulu, for example, recently revamped their Flash player. In their blog, they spoke to the topic of HTML5, and said that currently it doesn’t offer the features they want to provide. I think we’re going to see more of this sort of thing. Individual companies like Adobe and Microsoft can innovate with their respective technologies far more quickly than HTML5 can progress. They’re going to look for customer/developer needs and compete to satisfy those needs. If we’ve truly come to a time when people can’t think of anything they want that HTML5 doesn’t already deliver, then maybe I’ll be proven wrong. But I don’t think that’s the case yet.
Anyone who uses something like ClicktoFlash realizes how much flash content they do or do not need.
Yes Microsoft is putting a lot into Silverlight, and yet you don’t hear people clamouring to get Silverlight on mobile devices, even though in my experience it tends to have less problems, and use less CPU than flash does in Mac OS X (not sure about windows)
its not just HTML for video that HTML5 delivers, it does interactive, Vector graphics, etc… on May 21st, Google’s interactive pac-man logo was HTML5, and you can find other examples of Games, and other things being done with HTML5 that have nothing to do with video playback.
Hulu said that because it doesn’t deliver anything for the majority of their customer base, since the majority of web users are still using IE6, maybe 7. only a fraction use web browsers that support HTML5 at all.
I do not believe that HTML5 is ready for prime-time compared with flash (well, other than video delivery, which is OS related really) mostly because of the lack of developer tools. Dreamweaver CS5 users can download an HTML5 add-on pack as of Wednesday this week… but from the little I’ve read, it is far from Flash level tools
As of now, there’s no DRM/content protection for Ogg Theora, H.264 & VP8 videos that will be embedded using the HTML5 video tag (unlike with FLV + the Flash Media Server).
Until that happens, don’t expect big Studios & Networks who are very territorial about their content to just switch to HTML5 + tag.
Wow, so we are talking about a programming method that doesn’t work or completely exist yet and how its going to be the future over flash. I expect this will be the future, sometime well in the future when it works. Great article.
adam, sorry, but your comment is very very naive… the web is not ruled by the end user… not by any means… this is like saying the listener rules the world of music, which it doesnt, the music companies release tracks and we choose to like it or not, but we dont tell the music companies what they should be releasing…. the web is no different from this…
as for the flash debate, adobe can quite easily shift to releasing tools for html5 but it’s interesting to note that ms are now really pushing with silverlight yet i dont know why, do they see a gap in the market maybe? the latest i’ve heard there’s a few issues with html5 which will take years to iron out and in that time more and more mobiles will get released with flash enabled so i dont see it dying a slow death just yet
HTML5 isn’t a flash killer!, Apples move to exclude Flash has upset a lot of people, but the HTML5 vs Flash argument will soon be forgotten when all the other portable device manufactures bring out their cute Apple i clone devices that do support flash, Apple just excluded flash so they could sell loads of apps for their devices, Apple lead in very very cool devices and the cash needed to R&D such technology is expensive.
HTML5 and Flash both have their place, anybody who says differently doesn’t really understand either technology!
At Code Computerlove we’ve been experimenting with Flash and HTML5.
We’ve created a pong game that actually uses both Flash and HTML5.
The left side of the court is made using Flash and the right side has been used using HTML5.
Have a play and let us know what you think.
http://labs.codecomputerlove.com/FlashVsHtml5/
People are very confused about HTML5. Especially those who haven’t worked with both and haven’t got a taste of both. HTML5 is here to stay, it is for us, and it is for helping us with that boring monkey job nobody wants to do. From my personal point of view these are two completely different solutions. This is a very simple paradigm and It can be sorted out easily; use HTML5 for making those standard simple things and use Flash when you have to make very sophisticated robust things. Here is a good comparison of both (same algorithm) http://www.yoambulante.com/en/labs/balloon_html5.php have a good day everyone.