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
