Why HTML5 won’t Replace Flash Any Time Soon
- poor browser support (obvious)
- poor drawing optimizations (slow animations, even for simple things)
- poor quality in opensource video codecs
Perhaps in 2 years time it will become a viable alternative, but right now it’s really just hype brought on by Steve Jobs who said Flash is dead and HTML5 is the future. He’s only saying this because he’s highly biased against Adobe for not cow towing to Apple’s attempted influence over the development of Adobe products. Every Apple fanboy blogger jumped on his word alone and now you see sites like vimeo and youtube making crappy HTML5 versions of their player (and you have to admit, they’re crappy) thinking they’re ahead of the game but are really just going on a fool’s errand.
You can make an HTML5 product but it won’t ever be used in production before 2012 due to browser adoption rates. You can’t even drop IE6 from your compliance roster and the browser is 7 years old! At best you’d have a flash version of your product anyway, and then you’d have to do development against 2 products instead of one, which makes no sense from a business perspective.
My main concern is its poor performance in drawing. Word on the street is that Canvas is incredibly slow and be unable to do anything but basic animations. Flash is already moving onto the hardware with pixel shaders, this is lightyears ahead of where Canvas will be even 5 years from now. How long was Javascript out before anyone bothered to optimize their JITs? 10 years?
The funny thing is that you’ll probably end up seeing HTML5 plugins being released for older browsers, which ironically defeats the core purpose of these HTML5 features in the first place.
I’m not sure if you guys remember SVG but that was supposed to be the flash killer like 7-8 years ago. Back then I even learned SVG in and out anticipating it would replace flash (and even HTML) once and for all. Despite its open standards nature, it never ever took off and got mired in standards development gridlock. I don’t even think I bothered to put my expertise in SVG on my resume.
Also, if you are going to monetize your product via ads, you are going to have to wait for the entire advertising industry to move away from Flash as well in order to deliver ads in a fully HTML5 player. Considering they haven’t even moved away from Actionscript 2 yet I doubt that it will happen any time soon.
On the plus side when the time comes for me to dabble in HTML5 it will be a breeze to pick up.
2 Comments
It all comes down to market share. As you put it so finely why IE6 still has to be supported after all of these years. Since enough people still use it, many sites still need to support it. However, many are starting to ditch this quickly. The reason has little more to do than with the fact that adoption of IE6 has fallen to a point that moving ahead in technology for the loss of those users makes sense from a business perspective.
Flash is widely adopted in the Desktop browser market. Because of this, of course it will continue to find support and use. This isn’t the case in one of the fastest growing markets though, mobile. BlackBerry, many of the Nokia Phones, and of course iPhones which collectively make up the majority of the “Smart Phone” market have no support at all, or planned limited support. Past raw adoption, it has been shown that the iPhone users make up the heaviest amount of mobile browsing. With no support from Apple, and the 100M+ user base they already have, well this from a business perspective is no longer something that can be ignored. A tipping point is coming, if not already here, were the market is too large to be ignored, much like why IE6 still must be support, such is why Flash will be ignored for many sites moving forward. This isn’t to say all, but a good number of them. If it can be justified from a business perspective to ditch 100M+ users, well then by all means go forth. Of course Flash is more technical capable. It freaking needs to be to have any chance at all. But as you and I both know, the better technology doesn’t always win out.
Flash will survive if businesses feel its technical merits outweigh the loss in market potential. On a case by case basis, Flash will still have victories. In the long run, especially given Apples adoption rates, I suspect as a whole Flash will die off in the next 2-5yrs. Which in business terms is quick.
Under full disclosure, I have already had 3 clients request their work not use Flash so as to ensure that it works on their iPhones. One client in particular has me rewriting their existing Flash piece as Javascript/Animations.
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