CNet News
A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile debate over the future of the Web: should programmers continue using Adobe Systems’ Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead?
The debate has gone on for years, but last week’s debut of Apple’s iPad–which like the iPhone doesn’t support Flash–turned up the heat. Before that, Adobe had been saying with some restraint that it’s happy to bring Flash to the iPhone when Apple gives the go-ahead.
But Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch took the gloves off Tuesday with a blog post that said Apple’s reluctance to include Flash on its “magical device” means iPad buyers will effectively see a crippled Web.
1. Setting aside whether you like or hate Apple and their iPad, it is one of the two hugely disruptive forces in IT right now. Things haven’t been this interesting since the mid-90’s when the internet sprung up.
2. Plugins in the browser should go, not just Flash.
3. The biggest Flash site on the web is YouTube. Their HTML5 version is in Beta. (Yea, I know it’ll be in Beta forever. Old joke. Ain’t funny no more).
I hate that my iphone will never have flash.
If I wanted crippled hardware, I’d still be using MS DOS.
Google me a Nexus!
After reading hundreds of comments on multiple websites over the last few days I can summarize what I have seen into three broad categories:
1. Most Apple Mac users, by and large, HATE Flash with a venomous passion. It appears they largely have a negative experience (crashes, large resource usage, etc.) with the Flash plugin written by Adobe for Macs.
2. IT people don’t like Flash (and other plugins) because of the labor of keeping their user’s computers updated with the latest version and the numerous security threats posed by Flash.
3. Windows users pretty much just don’t care. For the most part Flash just seems to work for them. I suspect they don’t care about the occasional updates (just a couple of clicks) and they have to deal with so many security threats already that they don’t notice the few that may slip by and are caught by their anti virus/malware software.
.
The fact is, a LOT of sites use Flash and will for the foreseeable future. After all, 80% plus of their user base (Windows users) are not complaining.
I don’t see this battle going away soon.
No battle. Flash is the leading format for internet video. I feel that Apple lost the ball when Quicktime didn’t take, they under invested in it, treated it as a toy, a gimmick. Flash players will even stream Quicktime movie .mov H.264 files and you don’t even need to install Quicktime to see them. I believe that this is the underlying cause of Apple’s hate on Flash.
I see the writing on the wall… We had a web BEFORE there was Flash, and it worked well enough.
With HTML5, javascript, and CSS it should be possible to create nearly any effect wanted on a web site. If you can’t, did you really need that gimmick in the first place?
To bet against web sites moving to HTML5 and H.264 for video and HTML5 and javascript for menu and buttons that dance, etc. is a bad bet.
Some sites will drag their feet, but I expect they’ll drop Flash when they next have a site overhaul.
You heard it here first!
#5 Absolutely
It’s more than just Apple in this fight, they’ve just managed to surface this with iPad mania. The other part of this battle is Microsoft vs everyone else on the planet in the browser space. Old content creators vs the new guys. And there is a huge, huge hatred of still needing to support frickin’ IE6 after all these years. It’s all mixed up together.
Flash needs to die. As an IT pro of 20 years, I can tell you that it serves no useful purpose beyond advertisements and playing farmville, and a good percentage of the flash ads out there are simply designed to suck people into questionable if not downright malicious scams.
By the way, John, I have to say good job. The number of scammy ads on this site has gone way down recently.
As an IT pro of 25 years I can tell you that Flash is NOT going to die. No amount of html5 will replicate the rich media experience Flash brings to the web…. (take any site of http://www.thefwa.com for an example)…
While I am sure some people would love to have a static text based internet, with no rich media, no animations and no games MOST do not. If you think Flash is just for advertisers you are looking in the wrong places…
The anti-flash sentiments come almost exclusively from Mac users who are bitter that Windows runs it better than their ‘superior’ machines, and are also making excuses for not having it run on their expensive Mac gadgets…
NOTHING COMES CLOSE TO FLASH TODAY, excluding it from a device (whatever your excuse) is just restricting your own customers access to the richest parts of the web.
#7 have you seen the number of people that play farmville and other time wasting crap of its ilk? They number in the hundreds of millions.
Thats NOT a market that will vanish overnight if HTML5 is ever developed to anything more than it currently is, a way to play video without a plugin. Flash does FAR more than just video, it provides a huge degree of interactivity that HTML5 can’t, and even if every interactive thingy was recoded to use java it’d be swapping one dodgy system for one that is even worse.
And John, when the hell will you get rid of that ultimate scam ad about teeth whitening?? There have been many articles about the company marketing the scam and how bad they are, but I still keep seeing it till I add it to AdBlock Plus.
Hey you don’t want Flash and you read this blog?
Are you nuts, so you don’t want access to Tech5?
Don’t like all the videos from around the web?
Are you completely barking?
Flash is completely free for the end user, it is ubiquitous, easy to develop for and provides a coherent experience regardless of the platform…
Let’s have a replacement before we kill it off eh!
#4: I recently updated Internet Explorer from v. 6 (which was pre-installed on my laptop), to v. 8.0. I realized that I had not used IE v. 6 at all,as Firefox has been my browser of choice for some time.
However, lots of Web applications use Flash, and not just YouTube.
Flash will be around, until some other helper app does what Flash does, but faster and with more stability.
As a developer who used to hate Flash (until I started making software for it), I can say that HTML5 is nowhere near replacing Flash.
There are tons of very good API’s for Flash that are essential for writing large apps, like Spicelib, and until those get ported to HTML5, Flash can’t be replaced.
For everyone who says that the only thing Flash is good for are ads and videos, take a look at this site:
http://beatport.com
A shining example of Flash used properly.
H.264 will remain free for internet video through 2016. Video is covered.
Ads. Text and cleavage have the best response rate on the internet. Static images worse. Dynamic images even worse. Flash has lowest response rate.
Games. It’s the gap but when someone invents (and many are trying) a mechanism to deliver a far better Farmville over the net then things will change again. If I was a 20 year coder that’s where I’d be. If I had 20+ years of experience in the industry I would worry. Check the TIOBE index for confirmation.
No one, including me, thinks Flash will disappear overnight. Hell I even saw a Java applet last year. Adobe has lost their chops in content creation and could be leading the next generation of web based applications. Instead they froze. If they don’t watch it they’ll end up like ReadAudio which was a dominant internet format not so long ago and sat on their ass.
HTML5 is obviously going to be the next standard for HTML.
That will end all the arguments…
#14:
Yes, it obviously will, but the problem with html, no matter what the standard, is that the browsers will all implement it differently.
The advantage of something like Flash or Silverlight, is that the implementations are identical across operating systems.
#12 “beatport.com
A shining example of Flash used properly”
Yes, very properly. Instead of showing some content, I am pestered because the site thinks I don’t have Flash and/or Javascript. Although I do have both and they are enabled.
Flash is a piece of shit. So is Appleware. We should get rid of both to make the Internet a better place.
Like just about everything else, the html5 vs Flash debate is more nuanced than just “Flash is either good or evil”.
The fact is, Flash has its positives and negatives. It’s a plugin, which means it must be updated and maintained, it has a tendency to be a resource hog, it’s always lagged behind html in terms of accessibility and indexability, it’s yet another platform for web developers to learn, and it doesn’t degrade at all if the user doesn’t have Flash installed.
It’s also still the best tool available for creating complex user interactions and games, it’s the easiest way to deploy video on the web, and until relatively recently, it was the only way to create a richer (ie animations, effects, sounds, etc.) experience for regular websites.
When it comes to regular websites though, jQuery and CSS3 can now accomplish nearly everything that Flash used to be used for, while remaining accessible and degrading nicely for older browsers. Though HTML5 is still a ways away, it will make deploying video as simple as adding one line of code.
That should leave Flash to deal with complex applications, games, and whatever else people think up. Flash is useful and shouldn’t disappear. It should, however, take on more of a role as a complement to html rather than a replacement.
And yes, I do have experience developing in Flash and html, as well as php, asp, and javascript.
I loath flash because it is a poorly written hunk of crap and a royal pain in the butt but it is also the universal standard.
Not having it means web crawling is lame.
#16 Luc:
“Although I do have both and they are enabled.”
Really? What OS/browser combo are you using? It’s working for me on Linux.
What happened to the romance between Adobe & Apple? They used to make such beautiful “music” together, for example, Desktop Publishing, a whole new field at the time.
How long until HTML5 becomes a standard?
Well i think the discussion will be great anyways talking on the point that its NOT a market that will vanish overnight if HTML5 is ever developed to anything more than it currently is, a way to play video without a plugin
I like Flash.
70% of web video content relies on Flash which is why all the fuss. It is reliable, free, powerful and I’ve never had problem with it as a user.
If you hate it, it’s likely because “open source everything” is suppose to be cool and make you look smart.
HTML5! Why should I need a _plug-in_ to watch videos on the web?
Uncle Patso made me think.
Apple has been busy pissing off just about everybody lately, I guess.
I wonder how all this is going to work out.
Hey John C,
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the matter as far as your blog is concerned. Do you plan to:
1) Make it HTML 5 compatible so it will work on the iPad/iPhone/iTouch, but no work in older broswers that don’t support HTML 5.
2) Keep it the way it is using Flash for audio and video
3) Have two versions of the site
On another thought, I wonder if Adobe would ever pull “no more future versions of Photoshop for Apple” card?
Just FYI: the iphone sees YouTube videos embeded in the DU web pages just fine.
Father, you’re right about YouTube videos, however the Mevio videos (i.e. The Tech Hippy) doesn’t. Do you know if Vimeo files will work on the iPhone?
#19 brm,
Firefox 3.5 on Linux
charmingbob,
The videos on the Vimeo site play on my iphone. Is that what you’re asking?
Went I go to Vimeo with the iphone, the site gives me the mobile-web version. So it may adjust the video file format to ensure the files play on my phone?
First off, so what if flash is a plugin. Yes it needs to be updated.
Last time I check everyone will have to update their web brower for html 5.
conclusion–YOU WILL HAVE TO UPDATE SOMETHING (PERIOD)