The Death of Flash?
I’ve never been a fan of Flash, either as a developer or as a user, so I’m excited to see the possible beginning of the end for what has become the defacto standard for multimedia on the Web.
Its a common a complaint that the iPhone and upcoming iPad don’t have support for Flash, but why would they? The Flash player is a buggy, resource intensive , security risk that these devices are better off without. There is very little that Flash can do that can’t be done with other technology such as jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3 (see the links below for some examples) all of which will run on modern browsers without the requirement of any plugins.
The two main video streaming sites YouTube and Vimeo are trialing HTML5 versions of their sites, using the h.264 video format in place of Flash. I’m hoping that the popularity of Apple’s mobile devices will encourage more content providers (such as Hulu and BBC iPlayer) to turn their backs on Flash and embrace these new technologies.
For the past few weeks I’ve been using ClickToFlash for Safari, which blocks Flash content, giving you the option to run it or not. I have noticed a significant increase in the loading of pages and am not missing the horrible Flash ads that have frequently crashed my browser and brought even powerful dual core computers to their knees. I’m ready for a future without Flash and praise companies like Apple, Google and Vimeo for taking the initiative to push the latest in Web technology to improve their user’s experience.
JavaScript
CSS3 Animations
HTML5
February 13th, 2010 at 7:56 pm
As much I would agree that we will see the death of flash in the near future (or at least a huge drop of its usage), I think the main reason for it is slightly different than those mentioned in post.
The main reason for me would be the ever increasing complexity of usage. I can easily recall flash 5 or 6 days when creating a dynamic button with a link would just require few lines of code. Now with AS 3 it’s literally a page of code… I get that it’s because it’s more like a proper programming language, but that’s the case – never earlier Flash would be viewed as a programming platform, rather it was seen as a sloppy quick tool, where with few lines of code you’ve had what you’ve wanted.
That is also why I think jQuery is such popular (and is taking away people from flash) – with all those scripts and plugins you get a nice effect with just one or few lines of code.
February 14th, 2010 at 10:43 am
“The Flash player is a buggy, resource intensive , security risk that these devices are better off without.”
On the one hand, I agree. The internet would be much better off without flash.
On the other hand, while there certainly *is* very little that flash can do that html5/css3 cannot, neither of those standards are done yet, and while there is patchy support for them in some browsers, there is support for flash in the overwhelming majority of them.
As of last year, more than 95% of devices were already capable of rendering flash. What % of devices are already capable of rendering HTML5/CSS3?
A quick glance around the internet shows that the majority of people are still using IE (although thankfully no longer IE6). HTML5/CSS support in IE is virtually non-existant (although there are e.g. javascript libraries that add this support, their performance is so poor that you might as well not bother). About a quarter of the internet has decent HTML5/CSS3 support – changes to the spec notwithstanding.
I don’t know about you, but I’d find that a hard sell for a client!
“Hi, Mr person-who-is-paying-me! I’ve decided that Flash which 95% of the internet can use is rubbish, so let’s replace it with a technology which hasn’t actually been finished yet, which will prevent three-quarters of people from using our site, and mean that your site might break if the spec changes!”
Sure, you can provide fallbacks, graceful failures etc, but you can do the same with flash – a few sites have already started. Obviously it depends on the site you’re making, but at the end of the day, if you want to provide RIA-level user-experience, do you care more about the >50% of the internet using IE, or <5% of the internet using iP*? How many years do you think it will be before the number of users without flash support is less than the number of users without HTML5 support?
It's a ballsy move from Apple, and one with lots of potential to backfire.
Now, what I think we *will* see (and about time too!) is a massive reduction in the number of web applications that use flash where plain old html/css/javascript will do, so regardless of whether I think it was a wise decision on Apple's part, they get points for probably making my life easier!