Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away 483
CWmike writes "While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted, say industry analysts. 'There are many people who despise Flash, but I'm not sure they'd love the alternative right out of the gate. The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,' Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.' Here are six factors that give Flash a strong position over HTML 5 and other alternative Web media technologies in the foreseeable future. For starters, While Android has made Flash a wedge issue, Flash is just beginning to show up on multiple mobile device platforms, Wen writes. Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages, but Craig Barberich, vice president of marketing and business development at Coincident TV, highlights the pervasiveness of Flash on the Web as we know it: 'Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked about is a lot of the interactive elements.'"
quick 6 (Score:5, Informative)
1. The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.
2. Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.
3. Adobe provides strong tools and support for designers and developers.
4. Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers.
5. Flash remains popular with online advertisers.
6. HTML 5 still has video codec patent issues to work out.
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:5, Informative)
It's not HTML5, it uses WebGL which is not supported by IE, for example.
Re:quick 6 (Score:3, Informative)
Related to number 6, h.264 is INCREDIBLY intense for a CPU to encode. It takes a disgusting length of time to transcode video streams into this format. When you factor in mplayer/mencoder not even encoding them right, you have quite a mess coming down the pipeline. (They mess up the b-frames. Other tools can at least do this correctly).
Flash has already died (Score:2, Informative)
if you run 64 bit Linux.
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.winehq.org -- why dual boot?
Because for all the games that do work with Wine just as many don't.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla never actually implemented the Tamarin engine. Instead they made TraceMonkey.
Google Chrome Frame (Score:4, Informative)
at what point can we assume our web users will have HTML 5 and CSS3?
This point arrived roughly eleven months ago, at least to the extent that we can assume that our web users who use IE on Windows also have an account with administrator privileges. An admin can install Google Chrome Frame [wikipedia.org], a browser helper object for IE that embeds Google Chrome in an IE window and uses it on sites that request Chrome in a <meta> element.
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:4, Informative)
Quake II in HTML5
For one thing, that game was profitable as a native PC application years before it was ported to WebGL. For another, neither Firefox nor Mobile Safari supports WebGL.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:3, Informative)
Jobs/Apple is giving Adobe payback for treating them like a second class platform for the past decade
wasn't adobe one of very few platforms that kept producing their software suites for apple through their lean years?
Re:quick 6 (Score:3, Informative)
"4. Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers."
But it's horribly broken, and there are any number of browser extensions that one can load which allow you to extract the raw video and save it.
That's not what is actually going on. Flash supports encryption through RTMPe. Only Hulu and a couple other sites actually use this to protect content. If you remember a year or so ago, there was a big stink over rtmpdump which was able to access and decrypt this streamed content. It was formerly used by Boxee to access Hulu content directly, before they lost their semi-official access and started embedding a flash player in the program.
The majority of websites that support flash video are just doing direct file downloads. If you open up the page source, you can often see a direct link to the content which you can download yourself. At most, they provide some obfuscated form of the link that gets decoded by activescript in their player. All these browser extensions you are referring to do is decode that link on their own, and present it to the user.
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who would love to see better game support for Linux, and be done with MS forever, it annoys me to see people hyping up Wine as if it were actually a replacement for Windows and gaming.
With that type of misinformation out there it does two negative things: A) People try Linux/Wine, and see for themselves that it doesn't do a great job on modern games, and then blame Linux as a whole for it. B) It gives the impression that no work is needed, because Wine plays everything just fine.
More broadly... TFA is just plain dumb (Score:3, Informative)
I read the article with increasing amazement the farther into it I got. Among the six reasons why OMG we'll all die if we can't keep flash:
The other three, while not quite as egregious, are still not exactly compelling arguments for why web users should be very, very sad if Flash dies. What the hell was the author thinking here?
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you only play 10 year old 2D games, you're not going to have a whole lot of fun playing games with Wine.
I agree that for new games it's safe to assume you're SOL as far as Wine is concerned. But what you describe is utterly false. Years ago (2006ish I believe) I played WoW solely in Wine. And that is hardly 10 years old, nor is it 2D. I also played through all of Half-Life 2 via Wine three or so years ago. Played lots of Warcraft III, and various other games.
Again, I realize none of those are brand spanking new. But they are far from 10 year-old 2D games. You say you don't like people spreading misinformation about it working better than it does. On the same token I don't like seeing people stomping it down making it out to be completely useless.
Quietly, a new contender is being developed... (Score:5, Informative)
Nokia (yeah, remember Nokia?) is working on QTQuick and QML: a Qt/Javascript/CSS fusion language. [trolltech.com] (Formerly called Kinetic, now called QtQuick, and QML (the JS/CSS language)
It does everything that Flash does and is completely open source. What's more is it is not byte-code interpreted. The QML file is loaded into the QtDeclarativeEngine and evaluates and runs in native code. (Aside from Javascript, but Apple isn't arguing about JavaScript use)
*FULLY* open source, not interpreted (beyond JS), And damn easy to use... It will be a part of Qt 4.7 (next month?)
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:2, Informative)
Quake Live isn't Flash, it's a native plugin.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:5, Informative)
Having used Flash on Android (it sucks), I'd say Flash on iOS isn't about control, it's about evolving user experience.
You're right that Flash is easy to pick up and the tools are mature, but that's because Flash was only ever designed for one thing: desktop multimedia presentations, composited wholesale by the CPU, operated with keyboard and mouse, driven by a time-line. This makes it easy to make something quick, but it also results in monolithic components that are a pain to deal with for everyone else.
Even if you disregard battery-life, there are a bunch of user experience problems that need to be addressed to get Flash working on mobile. The biggest one is that touch requires smart/heuristic input to deal with fat fingers, to disambiguate gestures and to deal with limited screen real-estate.
In making the iPhone, Apple delivered (arguably) the first usable mobile browser, and they did so by changing many of the rules of how webpages are used... you use contextual touches, you zoom in/out, you use form selectors in isolation, the chrome auto-hides, videos are played fullscreen, etc. And surprisingly, they were able to do this without requiring existing webpages to change, by leveraging HTML/CSS' transparent, descriptive nature. Then, they just added a bunch of simple APIs to JavaScript to expose the various mobile/geo features. Suddenly, iOS was the most attractive web platform around.
To do the same to Flash would've been a huge endeavor and wouldn't change the fact that most Flash content simply doesn't work well on mobile. Plus, Apple would've had to work with Adobe on this... i.e. the company that has refused to make a decent Flash player for OS X for years. Good riddance, we'll manage with JavaScript and Canvas just the same.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:3, Informative)
Flash isn't "slow and attrocious" on an iPad or iPhone - it's non-existent. So anything is better :-)
Flash is fast even on my Wii, and a Wii is majorly under-specced - 256meg of ram on a sub-gigahertz display. And yet it has no problem with flash downscaling a 1366x756 HD game to 720 (the Wii's native display size). Give it a try - http://alphagfx.com/ [alphagfx.com] pick 17x17 (heck, it even loaded, downscaled and played one of the 1600x900 20-tile games).
If the Wii can do it (and let's face it, Wiis weren't made to run flash), maybe you should switch from crapuntu to another distro.
It works if you just want to write a game without worrying about platform differences. After years of hassles with different browsers and operating systems, I had forgotten how much LESS stupidity it was just coding it up in flash.
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:2, Informative)
Quake Live running Flash? Where did you read that?
From the Quake Live FAQ:
Q: What is a plugin and why must I install one?
A plugin is a browser component that allows our game to run from within inside your web browser, making QUAKE LIVE's game and website one unified interactive entity. The ActiveX plugin allows the game to run in your browser utilizing files that it downloads from our site and stores on your computer. The plugin ensures that these files are up-to-date every time you visit the site to play, streaming new content and updates to you without the need for you to download and install game patches.
(Source: http://www.quakelive.com/#faq/faq_question_5)
ID created a custom renderer and plugin for browsers. You know why? Because no technology was ready for the kind of performance requirement they needed. Flash could not cut it and the new HTML5 specifications had not progressed as far yet. The fact that now there is technology being implemented that allows you to directly use graphics hardware and run Quake 2 natively from a website may change that decision for future games wanting to do a similar thing. Which would be a major win for standards-based web browser games.
Flash games will never be able to compete with those types of games because Flash will not be able to do decent 3d rendering unless Adobe rewrites major parts of the Flash code base. This is because flash lacks any form of hardware acceleration, except apparently video rendering to a degree.