Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests
With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company's shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month - devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs - are "better than netbooks."
On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company's sentiments that "Flash is a CPU hog" and including support for the technology in Apple's mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.
However, recent tests have put Flash up against HTML5, the new web markup language that eliminates the need for the Adobe plugin. The results of these tests show that this is not a simple black-and-white issue. Is Flash really a CPU hog? Yes, in some cases. But, surprisingly, not all the time. In fact, sometimes HTML5 actually performed worse.
Testing Flash and HTML5
Jan Ozer is an expert in video encoding technologies, has worked in digital video since 1990 and is the author of 13 books related to the subject [Editor's Note: some people have pointed out that Ozer has done seminars and written books featuring Adobe products, so therefore he makes money from the success of Adobe Flash. We don't think that has any effect on the test outcomes, but we thought it was worth updating the post to note it.] Recently, he put HTML5 up against Flash in a series of tests that pitted the two technologies against each other on both the Mac and PC and in different web browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.
The results of the tests in their entirety are published here on StreamingLearningCenter.com. The summary in a nutshell? Flash isn't always a CPU hog, sometimes that honor goes to HTML5.
Some of the highlights of Ozer's findings are below, broken up into both Mac and Windows test results.
Mac Tests
- With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%
- With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)
- With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome
Windows Tests
- Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU
- Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.
- On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0
- In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU
Hardware Acceleration Key to Flash Performance
In analyzing the results of the tests, Ozer determined that the key to better Flash performance was dependent upon whether or not it could access hardware acceleration. This feature, launched in Flash 10.1, allows the plugin to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) on some computers to decode video. Depending on the video card and drivers, (NVIDIA, AMD/ATI and Intel offer products that support this), the video decoding process in Flash 10.1 can now work for all video playback, not just full-screen playback as was available in Flash 10.0.
According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X, the latter because Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. Adobe goes on to say "The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."
Here's what this all means in layman's terms: Apple isn't allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load. Adobe is waiting and watching to see if they do, but, as Ozer says "the ball is in Apple's court."
Will Apple budge? At this point, it's unlikely. In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it's simply not an efficient technology...and that's true for now, considering how it's set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?
So while Flash's "CPU hogging" may be a contributing factor in Apple's decision to not support the technology on their mobile devices, that's probably not the only reason behind the block.
Thank you to Dan Rayburn, who pointed us to Jan Ozer's article.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Apple has made much more noise about how they feel Flash is insecure, or otherwise buggy, then they have about how it's bad for battery life. If HTML5 proves as insecure and buggy as Flash, then I'll have to question Apple's sanity.
But even then, where is the surprise? HTML5 is barely out of the gates as pre-beta stuff.. the standard isn't even properly ratified. And yet, in some cases it's already competitive with (or better than) Flash? I'm seeing no problem here.
If this is what's needed to get Adobe off their butts to stay competitive with Flash, then I'm all for it. At worst, we'll have an standard that's competitive with Flash, that works well across platforms. I see no problem with it being rough for a few years, since I dealt with Futuresplash in it's infancy and found it just as lame.
Maybe it's about revenue.
Two major online sources of revenue are:
1: Ads 2: Content
Is it any surprise that Apple is blocking a competing company's standard, when that standard is used mainly for ads and delivering content?
It's less about control of the device, and more about control of the distribution channel/money.
Any content coming through an iPhone app is an opportunity for apple to share in the revenues for both ads and content.
If people miss their flash content, the potential downside for apple is that people will buy Android rather than Apple devices. If that happens, the worst case scenario is Apple sells us a story about how they "finally" adopted flash because the "brilliant engineers" finally came up with a solution.
However, if people don't miss Hulu and the intrusive CPU/bandwidth hugging ads enough to buy a competing device, the upside for Apple is enormous. A proprietary disto channel for Video, Ads, and now with iPad, Print.
These guys aren't playing around.
@Jensen, read Tinic's comments on his blog if you're unclear about why the available Quicktime API's are unsuitable for Flash:
"QuickTime is inadequate for the Flash Player for about 100 or more reasons. Examples: - It does not support RTMFP or other required protocols by the Flash Player. - It does not provide low level access to an H.264 decoder. - You can not read back RGB data with reasonable performance. - Pre 10.6 only supported baseline and some of main profile. etc. etc. etc."
http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html
@Others, for those complaining about this article not comparing HTML5 to Flash, don't be so lazy - read the article linked to in the main text (from StreamingLearningCenter.com) for the results yourself.
Apple must have a strong motive to push HTML5 H.264 if Flash could be made to work much better on Macs and they don't offer the hooks to Adobe. Maybe Apple is driven by iPod/iPhone/iPad development and just finds Flash is not workable on such devices (in their opinion) so they'd rather have HTML5 all around.
Google is certainly in a strange position given Chrome's HTML5 and Flash performance. I wonder how Android will fair if it supports both. My gut still tells me that they'd benefit from HTML5 H.264 in both as well and that's why I find the performance you found with Chrome odd. You'd think Chrome would have better performance there at this point.
In short, there's a desire for a single standard be it Flash or HTML5 with Apple pushing on one site, Adobe on the other, Google may be the decider depending on what they believe benefits Chrome and Android.
Reactions to ipad without flash: http://bit.ly/flash-on-ipad-right-or-wrong
Flash assumes mouse input, will never function properly for touch ( iPad, Android tablets ) without a total rebuild....
This is nonsense. I've been building kiosk touchscreen apps in Flash for years. Admitted Flash does not yet support multi-touch but touch-friendly Flash apps are a matter for the app developers .. not for Adobe to rebuild Flash
Adobe has been successful in framing the issue in terms of video playback with a beta version of Flash. Video is only part of the story. Those flash ads suck down obscene amounts of CPU and battery life on my MacBook Pro.
I find it comical that Apple, arguably the most closed and secretive company in the world, is being considered a proponent of open web standards just because they do not allow Flash or other runtimes onto their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth - the moment HTML5 was capable of eating into their App Store revenue model (which it won't be for a long time) they'd block that too.
If you really think that Apple is doing this for anything else but business reasons then you are kidding yourself. And yes, Flash will be just fine with or without Apple's help. I'm looking forward to the day when all the Apple fanbois whinge about those darn HTML5-based audio-autoplaying banners that can no longer be effectively blocked. Sorry to disappoint you, but the technology is not at fault here, and annoying ads as well as CPU hogging web apps will never go away.
There is no way that Adobe is being honest here.
"According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X, the latter because Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. "
Um, what? No, really, WHAT? Are they saying that Apple is not letting Flash make OpenGL calls from a browser plugin? The people who did Processing for the Mac will be absolutely amazed to learn that.
Or are they saying their hardware acceleration is tied in to some API Apple doesn't even implement? DirectX perhaps? Adobe has played brinksmanship games to force Apple to change their APIs in the past (remember the Photoshop-vs-Yellow-Box-I-mean-Cocoa war?). This is more of the same.
Personally I hope that flash dies. I don't use Mac (don't like Apple or Steve Jobs) I use Linux and have Blackberries, and flash has finally gotten usable on Linux but it's still a PITA. I just hate it. Partly because Adobe owns it (money hungry bastages) and partly because I feel that I shouldn't have to download a flipping plugin just to view content on a website. Maybe if Adobe made flash player open source....yeah right, what was I thinking?
Anyway, come on HTML5, I'm rooting for you!
Its not just speed, Its also about stability. Flash causes crashes more often on FF + Linux.
@todd :
Search google before talking about things you don't know...
Making flash files can be done for free. The only paying thing is th Flash Authoring tool, but anyone can generate Flash files for free using a notepad or free tools like flashdevelop, Adobe provides all that's necessary !
And Flash allready works perfectly on touch devices, all mouse and keyboard events are translated automatically.
No problem to criticise Flash, but search before saying nonsense...
I'll have to call bullshit on this. The claim that hardware acceleration is not available in neither OS X nor Linux is just ridiculous. OS X even provides optimized wrapper libraries specifically for this purpose, namely CoreAudio and CoreVideo functions, as well as numerous built-in codecs and multimedia capabilities. With Snow Leopard, Apple furthermore introduced Grand Central Dispatch, as set of technologies dealing explicitly with efficient multicore computing, including offloading work to the GPU. Adobe's claim regarding Linux is equally baseless, since standard Linux distros come with a plethora of hardware acceleration packages for graphics, sound and multimedia handling. On top of that, Linux systems are very easy to extend, nothing stops them from including a nonstandard library here and there to help things along.
With these facts in mind I'd have to conclude that Adobe is simply not telling the truth, possibly because of the whole spat over Apple's mobile devices. And it seems to be working. Flash on iPhone OS is a completely different can of worms, and yet people are already having trouble telling it apart from OS X.
I am curious to see how Silveright 3 and even Silveright 4 do in comparison. While flash has more market share, Silveright is a compelling new player in the RIA space.
I was writing a comment that just outgrew itself into a full blog post. You can read it here http://blog.rduartes.net/post.cfm/flash-and-html5-again.
It looks like we, yet again, have someone comparing Flash to HTML5 on a video basis alone. Flash is much more than video!
What it all boils down to is this statement: The difference between Flash and HTML5 is that HTML5 will get better.
"Let's just get right down to, shall we? Steve Jobs, as bright as the guy is, just doesn't want the ability for people to create Adobe Air apps for free to place on devices like the iPad or other Apple devices that can replace paid applications that folks would normally pay for from Apple.
It's not a compatibility issue. It's a greed issue. If your Mac is crashing because of Flash whereas PCs do not? Well - buy a PC - they just work."
Not having a flash plugin on the iPhone OS does NOT stop developers using Adobe Air to create apps for the App Store.
So you advocate buying a computer based on its ability to use flash? OK. BTW, Mac's don't "crash" because of flash, maybe the browser crashes (except Snow Leopard, where the plugin runs as a separate process, so flash dies all alone ). Just thought I'd set the record straight on that one. My recommendation would be to buy a Mac and install ClickToFlash.
As to the greed issue, are you seriously suggesting that Apple are trying to control everything on the Internet??? You seem to have a real problem with Apple, but to suggest this is paranoid delusional.
Just sayin.
@stefan
"f you really think that Apple is doing this for anything else but business reasons then you are kidding yourself."
Of course they're doing it for business reasons, they are a business and so they do that kind of thing.
BUT, the reason they're doing it is so they can fix problems without relying on some other company who couldn't give a rats ass. At the moment, Apple can have 100% control of the iPhone OS. It really is that simple
@Udo, I don't think that is right. Sure, Flash could use CoreVideo/Quicktime for simple video playback as Chrome does on Mac but Flash needs much more than this. How would they implement RTMPE? Adaptive-bitrate? How would they implement their custom metadata event system? Real-time video filters with decent performance? Augmented reality? They need much more low-level access to the stream than the current APIs provide. Unless you're suggesting that Flash on OSX should be limited to what CoreVideo/Quicktime can provide and not be feature-comparable to the Windows version?
You missed Linux, I would like to know the performance comparisons for Linux, Ubuntu will be fine.
So, to be clear: When Flash can offload its video processing onto the video card, it 'only' takes 7% CPU now. That's ridiculous!
Regarding the performance specifically, this is no different from Windows vs. Linux.
With Flash, we have to wait for Adobe to address the performance and security issues.
With HTML5, we can choose Chrome, Firefox, Opera, eventually Safari and IE, etc.
HTML5 encourages competition. If video performance is something that (super) users care about, they will start to use and recommend that browser.
Apart from CPU hogging and battery drain, (which is not necessarily proportionally related to CPU/ hardware acceleration), Apple has indicated the inherent instability of Flash in the Mac platform. As a long time Mac user I can atest to this when processing program exceptions and problem reporting to Apple. In Windows XP, at least with IE 7, it seems to also be the case. It would be good to test for these issues too before assuming conclusions that make little business sense. Since 1997, Steve Jobs has shown a firm policy in adopting non-propietary standards going forward with new technologies both in hardware and software, (to the detriment of some nice Apple technologies like Firewire for example).
To conclude, if you use flash you are 100% dependant on the fact that Adobe chooses or is able to render flash efficiently. Something which is only the case for windows. Linux flash support is a joke and 64-bit version has been really buggy since it finally came out a year ago!
If you go HTML5, the performance depends on what browser you choose and what support it has for video rendering. There are browsers for pretty much all systems that will do this effectively.
To conclude, if you don´t want to lock yourself down to running Adobe flash on windows, HTML5 will be faster and better supported.
Well, Apple is always blocking and closing, reminds me M$ by now.
BTW why are no Linux tests? Linux can't be left out such a comparison.
@Nevermind50
Why is is preferable for Apple to have 100% control of the iphone os? With Andriod I can have 100% control of my own phone.
This whole flash nonsense needs to be done away with. Why is it important for little animations? Advertising? Games? Pop up & down menus? So what? Microsoft products & flash are among the worst security risks in the modern era of computing & the quicker they go, the better off the world will be.
Adobe's whole attitude towards GNU/Linux is shameful. Apple won't release the API's, but GNU/Linux is wide open, folks, so what's the hold up? There must not be any money in it.
I just hope we can all keep from killing & attacking each other over this issue until a time comes when I can have a chip in my brain to stream this content directly to the front of my mind. Fingers crossed!
So... what about Linux? Just Windows and Mac results mean nothing.
" This feature, launched in Flash 10.1, allows the plugin to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) on some computers to decode video "
I remember S3 trio had some hardware accelerated playback back in mid 90's. And Adobe use it 15 years later :)
@youngluck and @joseph: Jan Ozer does, indeed, write books and give seminars about Adobe products, but he's far from a shill for Adobe. He's also one of the most respected experts on video compression and codecs in the business. He's written for StreamingMedia.com for years, and he's never shied away from criticizing any vendor when it's warranted.
I don't see the point comparing an decade old product with a working standar. I use linux and flash is just a pain ...
I don't like that all Flash depends on Adobe making Flash more secure, stable, and efficient. I do like that the browser companies can compete to make the best html5 engine to run video. Java sucked until there was competition. Web videos will suck until there is equal competition. I'm really glad Apple refuses Flash and Mozilla refuses h.264. Keep it open.
Performance is just one side of the coin. The main reason Flash is shunned by Apple is that it breaks stuff which can't be fixed by Apple. If some internal code breaks Safari, then they just analyse it, write a fix and are done with it, but it flash crashes they can only say to Adobe: "can you fix it ASAP pretty please". That's not very satisfying for them and the crashes reflect bad to Apple from the users, not to Adobe.
The other thing is: HTML5 is very new, and not well optimized yet. There are lot's of improvements to be made and the performance picture will change very much over the coming years. At the same time, Flash probably nears the peak performance, as it already had years of optimizations done.
I'm not quite sure why people compare HTML5 with Flash.
Comparing the Canvas tag with Flash is possible, but ultimately something very much for the future as in their current forms they are literally worlds apart.
I use social search and productivity app Zahdoo.com which is flash based app. Recently I downloaded Flash 10.1 beta and I notice a significant performance improvement. Flash with 10.1 is almost twice as fast as before. I hate Apple not allowing access to Adobe.
wow, everything is moving so fast! imagine all the technology in about 10 years ... i am really excited! good post!
Greets! :)
These numbers are fine for the author's specific setup, but doesn't in any way reflect my experience and i doubt a general validity.
It's true, that there're some hardware/software combinations which take flash quite well. But there'r just to many, which seem just to hate flash.
HTML5 seems the right choice for many flash use cases- It just does integrate a whole lot better in a web-page then any plugin, which is not interpreted by the webbrowser and must so always be something alien to the embedding page.
In my opinion, web-design with flash was always only the 2nd best approach.
Sorry flash, but i won't grieve over you.
I don't understand the fuss about not supporting flash. Let the people have an option.Why should the ipad or iphone not have flash? If people think it will drain battery life let them not use Flash Applications. It is all about the Apple ego which needs to be crushed.
Perhaps those that run flash blockers have a very specific reason to. But those people are in the minority and doing so deprives them of what the Web has become: a beautiful, dynamic, and feature-rich medium that engages the Web surfer. A quick trip to archive.org will remind you want the Web was like in 1995.
Flash, or something like it, HAD to be developed in order to compete with that other technology we've grown to love: television. You cannot blame past companies that built out with Flash because let's be honest, animated GIF's just didn't cut it at the time.
Apple's choice not to support Flash, from a user's perspective is definitely a "break it" for me. I can barely forgive them for not including it on the iPhone. With a mobile device, we for some reason still forgive manufacturers when things don't work correctly. We also tend to throw all common sense out the window when excuses such as "too much cpu power" and "too much battery life" get thrown around. If you believe that, I have a bridge in New York...
Further, to have it absent from their iPad, which people will use primarily to surf the Web from their couch or bedside, will anger many buyers because suddenly that little blue box where Flash should appear is much much larger. And with more and more sites forgoing non-Flash
versions, the frequency of those blue boxes will increase dramatically. There are already iPad competitors on the market running full versions of Windows. Now is not the time for Apple to start disabling features.
Its so obviously a business decision, simple as that. Why would they want something that destroys the app market completely and any ventures from that? IE tom tom maps, anything. It would all probably lose them a lot of money.
They should allow flash on websites surely.
Well, there's two mistruths that seem to be repeatedly brought up here:
1. "With Flash, you are 100% reliant on Adobe to make a better Flash player". This is untrue. Anyone can build a Flash player. The SWF spec is open. This is what the Open Screen Project is about. google, Palm, RIM, etc. are all working with Adobe to build/port Flash players for their environments.
2. "HTML5 (video) will be better because of competition between browser vendors". Of course, the same applies to Flash. It will compete directly with HTML5 in terms of video, in addition to cometing with Silverlight, Java, etc. There is no difference. Adobe has the same incentive to improve their performance. Currently Flash has a large advantage over HTML5 videos by supporting H.264 across all browsers, as well as adaptive bitrate technology, encryption, custom metadata system, etc. Some of these issues will be very hard for HTML5 to resolve, eg. the codec issue unless Google open-sources its On2 codecs and these see wide adoption (Microsoft? Doubtful).
The problem with these debates is that the comments get filled with 95% Mac/Linux guys, but in the real world you guys are lucky to make up 6% of the OS landscape.
94% of us run windows and have never really experienced any of these negative issues regarding Flash.
But a couple points:
1) HTML5 will be just as bad as flash, if not worse, when put in the hands of developers. There is nothing inherintly slow about flash, it just lets you do more, so people do more, and you get a heavy site.
Now that people can do more with HTML, they will, and you'll get super heavy sites/banners in HTML5.
2) Browsers support of standards is SLLLOOWWW. This is the achilles heel of HTML5. It'll be 3-5 years before we have a really stable reliant HTML5 implementation across browsers, that I as a developer can target. In the meantime, doing anything highly reliant on HTML would require I make about 7 different versions of something, and fill it with ugly hacks/workaround to get it to work.
In the meantime, while HTML5 flounders, and browser makers finally agree in implementation, Flash will have gone through 3-4 major versions, and have a ton of new functionality.
Flash just moves faster, is more flexible, and more reliable. 3 advantages that made it popular in the first place, and are still as strong as ever.
HTML 5 will suffer the same problems as Flash. If HTML 5 claims itself to be a replacement for Flash, then it will be able to do everything that Flash can do.
Including annoying HTML 5 Popup adverts, and intros, flying 3D banners that needlessly utilise the OpenGL core.
It's all up to the developer to make good tools.
And Flash Player 10.1 now supports touch UI and i've been developing for Flash for free for years, using FlashDevelop and the free Flex compiler [windows only though].
Maybe Adobe should make a native Flash App that can browse the web and play flash swf files instead of relying on the mobile safari to load their plugin and provide all that native access. On the desktop you use plugin due to distribution e.g. less things to install. On the mobile devices like iphone and ipad - people are accustomed to downloading apps as the process is relatively easy as compared to installing desktop applications.
Are we all crying over solving the wrong problem?
-Hung
I've been a software developer now for five years. While I've never worked on applications involving video encoding and my experience with accessing the video hardware to work with 3-D graphics and vector graphics is limited, one thing I do know is there are a lot of developers that stopped considering when designing and building applications.
The tests prove that on a Mac, Flash’s performance is horrible compared to Windows. The fact that Adobe released a product that performs less then par on Mac as opposed to Windows tells us they don’t care about the Mac market because Windows is still dominating. Why should Apple let Adobe write terrible performing software on their hardware? In the end, a non-technical user would just blame Apple because they don’t understand that Adobe’s software wasn’t optimized to run on the iPhone, iTouch, or iPad.
I’m personally tired of companies that push out software that eats up CPU, RAM, and hard disk. If you tried this stuff ten years ago, your software would have failed because resources were limited. Now a days, developers act like they have unlimited resources. Kudos to Apple for making a software vendor take responsibility for their code.
this isn't a very scientific study...
so...
do you blame the browser...
or,
the technology (flash, html5)
for the piss-poor performance?
Don't forget development on HTML5 hasn't finished yet.
Its like Apple is selling a TV that only plays DVD's...But telling us its the best TV experince...Sorry wasnt born yesterday, not for me..Apple thinks that money grows on tree's and because they don't like somethings everyone has to redesign everything to suit them...Communist Apple
Personally I don`t see anything wrong with using Flash for video. It is a clear leader in terms of delivering rich media content to the end user and no, don`t bring on HTML5 at all. There is really no need for it, it is not innovative, mostly copies everything we FLASH developers have been doing for the last 10 years with so much ease !
Mobile devices will soon support Flash ( some of them already do ) and Apple will have no choice but drop their rather dirty policies and allow a huge Flash community to create the most innovative products for their crappy devices. at the end of the day, it is simply a mobile phone, nothing else. so narrow-minded people stop fabricating dirty stories, you are fooling yourself ! Flash dominates the market and still remains the most appealing rich-media production tool. SEO, deep linking = all can be taken care of nowadays. myths about the above mentioned issues should be dispersed and left buried in the past.
most importantly, If Flash crashes your mac, then ditch it and buy a pc with Linux on it. Mac OS X is a stolen version of Linux, the actual core does not belong to Apple, it is an open source project made available to you for a nice fee !
Lastly, there is no HTML5-Flash war. It has never existed. HTML 5 owns no market and wont be in that position for the next 10 years ( fingers crossed ), it is only being very well promoted by those fearing ever-growing power of Adobe who could easily destroy the whole apple business model by pushing its powerful technologies onto those two "revolutionary" devices.... AIR - FLEX - FLASH - ACTIONSCRIPT - oh dear ! a lot to be worried about unlike a simple, limited markup language....
I don't understand this argument that HTML 5 is going to be the death of Flash. HTML 5 (which by the way has no set release dae), from my understanding, will come equipped with new tcontrols, the ability to do some simple animations, as well as a new video codec. I'm all for this, as I believe it's unnecessary for sites such as Hulu and Youtube to have to use the Flash plug-in when they are only using it for video playback.
It's important to note though that Flash is actually extremely light-weight when you consider how powerful of a platform it is. You don't believe me? Try to remember how slow Java Applets were (Flash's main competitor in the late 90s).
of (especially when you include the Flex framework).
The weaknesses of Flash its opponents always name (it's proprietary software, it's a compiled one-off plug-in, and it's comparably cpu intensive) are also its greatest strengths. Flash is more powerful and developer friendly than HTML 5 or javascript could ever dream of being.
So while HTML 5 may end up replacing some of the simpler things Flash does (and for good reason). Both large Rich Internet Application as well as more complex browser-based animations and games, will still require the Flash platform. The need for these will ensure Flash will continue to thrive for years to come.
One last thing to realize is that this entire recent questioning of the reliability of Flash has been brought on by Apple, as an attempt to explain its lack of support for the platform on its mobile devices. Please realize that this is merely a scapegoat argument, as this decision is purely monetary (support for Flash will cut into Apple's App store revenue) and not technologically based at all.
My $.02 on this clearly contentious issue: I've been doing animation, developing content and programming apps in Flash for several years. If, as some people contend, flash is buggy, it is simply because developers come in all flavors and some write airtight code, and others don't.
I started using jquery last year for simple browser driven animations, and think its pretty damn great (though a bit wonky to code, imo). If HTML5 can deliver a compelling reason to produce some feature in something other that a discreet plugin - great! If it can't - then we have a lot of other options to do so. In the end, its our job as developers to produce an ever cleaner, user-friendly, and compelling online content - and we have many, many options to do so.
That being said the Flex SDK and the Flashdevelop authoring tools are FREE as air and provide a powerful open source method of producing SWFs, if you're interested.
Previous 1 2 3 4 Next