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.'"
Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:5, Insightful)
He wanted to drive a competitor out of the marketplace, which is easy, when you control the marketplace.
But I want it to go away (Score:4, Insightful)
Flash was nice when it came out.
but today it's just heavy to load, and compared to what you can do with HTML5 and CSS3 it's only advances is that it's a plug-in so people with old browsers (or browsers that do not mean that there is a point in supporting HTML5/CSS3) can see advance web grafic, and play online browser games
TFA contradicts itself (Score:4, Insightful)
a San Francisco-based company that sells what it calls a "platform-agnostic" framework that allows its clients to create video with interactive elements that can be experienced on either the iOS-based devices or devices that run Flash.
So it works on iOS too. Which means it works without Flash. Chances are it's HTML 5, so it will work in every other modern browser too. Problem solved.
only a matter of time (Score:0, Insightful)
Necessity is the mother of invention. Not having your game/animation/whatever running on an iPhone makes you seem like a one-man development team at best.
Barberich (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like this guy understands that video is not the highest form of content in an interactive medium. I'm not defending flash, but let's face it, the web got big when HTML forms were introduced and information was able to flow both ways. By itself, video is still a one way street.
Persistance (Score:5, Insightful)
I also think that even once everything Flash does can be recreated in HTML, the more locked-down nature of Flash (at least against casual probing) may make it more tempting to companies streaming video, music, and other such products.
The biggest way to hurt Flash, I think, would be to create a nice opensource development IDE for HTML5, comparable to what Adobe gives us for Flash. If you can get kids and artists to feel comfortable creating simple drag-n-drop animations and games, you'll be legitimate competition.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:5, Insightful)
While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted
The lack of Flash on iOS isn't going to kill off Flash or iOS ... it only prevents Flash from spreading to another platform. Though they are rather popular, iDevices aren't the be-all and end-all of computing. These redonkulous claims only distract from the fact that Jobs/Apple is giving Adobe payback for treating them like a second class platform for the past decade. Payback's a bitch, so suck it up Adobe. You have Flash, Apple has iOS ... you're both going to make big profits for the foreseeable future.
Adobe's flash player is evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew Flash had a certain air of suck about it because of some of the security issues. Then I went to FX's talk at BlackHat US 2010. He released a tool (Blitzableiter http://blitzableiter.recurity.com/ [recurity.com]), that essentially does all the file validation for SWF files that Adobe's Flash player Completely Fails at. I think that maybe I would feel a lot better about Adobe's position if they didn't still have, after just about 10 years, a giant kludge job that they expect us all to freely install in our browsers.
Balderdash (Score:4, Insightful)
....Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, ....
Adobe has had years to "optimize Flash" and it is still a resource pig. I'd say given the hugely short amount of time HTML5 has been here it is already way better than Flash was for the same time frame. The bottom line; flash has always sucked and still does.
Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
So, is this why exactly the same video uses 50+% of my CPU playing in Flash, 20% playing with VLC (ffmpeg), or 20-30% with QuickTime? I hope no one with this guy's definition of optimizing goes near any code that I use. Flash video performance is absolutely terrible, flash vector image drawing is poor, flash compositing is an embarrassment. Flash ActionScript performance is reasonable, but the Tamarin engine found in Flash is also in Mozilla, and it's been a while since FireFox won any JavaScript performance competitions...
Re:Barberich (Score:3, Insightful)
By itself, video is still a one way street.
Obviously you've never used Chatroulette [wikipedia.org] ... which is basically 'crotch shot roulette' ;-)
Jobs had many reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of jobs reasoning was good and some was in substantial. Clearly he had some motivation to see it the way he did but that does not make the issies he raised vanish.
One of the most substantial is who gets to set the common denominator. If you innovate a new feature in your device, say haptic response, and flash does not support it, you are sort of at the mercy of adobe.
Conversely, of course is the embrace and extend effect we all know and hate. Internet Explorer defined the web non-standards and held things back. People wrote to the IE specific features and things borke on standards based browsers. Flash currently lets you do more than open standards do particularly in the area of DRM, advertising, paid content and feedback to the server. As a result people who need that will write for it. People for whom it is the easiest way to implement something, say bank security, will use it. It will be has hard to get rid of as IE.
Meanwhile as I said, while extending in some ways it will homogenize the device capabilities an limit innovation in that realm.
Since Apple has a history of bringing new features to devices early and depricating old ones early, they are right to see flash as harmful to them.
But from the point of view of taming a lot of different phone manufactured tweaked versions of Android or Symbian or windows 7, or simply writing cross platform flash is going to win unless the standards catch up soon.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Disallowing Flash or cross-compiling from Flash on iOS is no more different than doing the same on the PSP or Nintendo DS. Or do you demand Sony and Nintendo open the flood gates for homebrew?
- Apple already allows "homebrew" apps through their App store, just not Flash
- who knows [pcworld.com]?
The issue is Apple wants to maintain the chokehold on their app store being the only source of apps, whereas Flash would effectively bypass it.
I can give you one. Because evil never dies. (Score:3, Insightful)
Keeping flash off my iPhone was a great decision by Jobs.
I'll take that wager (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll take that wager -- how much do you want to bet?
Counter argument (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a couple of easily debunked arguments :
The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms.
Exactly 1 single other platform : Android.
All the rest are only promises for some time in the future.
Meanwhile, HTML5 is an open standard meaning that everyone is free to implement it, including opensource implementations like Webkit and Gecko, and closed source like Opera's Presto and... huh... well... maybe IE's engine. Some day. Eventually.
But it's already available today on a huge number of platform and could be implemented on any new platform withouth needing to wait for Adobe to agree to port it.
Flash is used for more than just video delivery on the Web.
You know what ? So are HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript.
Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers.
And is a total joke. RTMPE doesn't even use a secret to encrypt the streams, only some publicly available data and scrambling. Read about it in the Analysis [lkcl.net] section of RTMPdump [lkcl.net]'s docs.
Even a HTTPS server serving the data stream for the VIDEO HTML5 tag could provide better protection, simply because at least non logged-in users can't get the content.
Flash remains popular with online advertisers.
Sorry ? And that's a good argument how ?
So the only good arguments in favor of Flash are :
- Video codec patents problems (and that's about to change as the "as much close to H264 as possible but with the patented bit left out" WebM format has been introduced by On2 and Google)
- Good tool suite to develop (and that's a really good argument, but could one day change if better tool for HTML5/CSS/Javascript are developed)
That's probably the single only good argument in favour of flash. If developer and artist are given nice tools they will produce content. Flash has the nicest tools, so for now, Flash is preferred by the people who create the content and thus more Flash content is created.
Flash Cookies (Score:4, Insightful)
I would think the use of persistent Flash cookies is another major reason Flash isn't going away. The advertisers love being able to to track in a stealthy way.
Flash was not the first web video (Score:3, Insightful)
Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages
No, I would have to remind him that he probably wasn't around when there were plenty of other ways to get video on Web pages. There was the QuickTime plugin for starters. There were plenty of rtsp players, of which RealPlayer was most prominent (but crappy). Flash was not first, not by a long way. If he meant interactive, sure. If he meant with lots of embedded controls, sure. But that's pretty selective, and in the era we're talking about, embedded controls weren't a killer feature.
To be fair, most of the other solutions were pretty lame. Not that Flash isn't lame either - it's just somewhat less lame an attempt. That's its legacy: it's not as shit as RealPlayer.
No one uses Flash correctly. (Score:1, Insightful)
Its main strength, vector graphics AND video (which use low bandwidth), are rarely used. Vector graphics can go beyond solid color, cartoony looking images. One can create photo realistic images that scale up with vector. Instead its just used to serve up bandwidth hogging video. What a waste.
Want to have a secure job in graphics? Master making photo realistic images. The bandwidth and storage savings (at a big company, of course) will more than pay your salary.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:5, Insightful)
A potential flaw like the recent Apple bug that allowed jailbreaking on the iPhone is an excellent example. Apple patched their own within a few weeks. They would be completely at the mercy of Adobe if such a bug existed in Flash. Would you put yourself willingly in that position?
In that particular case it was a major security flaw in iOS itself that Apple needed to fix, regardless of the source. Flash would be no different... if a Flash game was able to jailbreak the iPhone it would point to a flaw in iOS, not in Flash.
Apple really needs to get a clue about security in iOS rather than relying upon the application gatekeeping process to do it for them.
Re:oh yes it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really. Is that going to happen on the year of Linux on the desktop, or the year that Duke Nukem Forever comes out?
Maybe web technology as we know it really will go away someday -- but considering I've heard someone predict that it was about to every year for the last 15 or so, I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:3, Insightful)
"Well considering how the only people who still use the old crappy IEs are"
I'm not talking about crappy old IEs, but about the snappy new IE9 which will be faster than Mozilla for page rendering.
I want it to go *when there is something better* (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic problem is that while it's easy to criticise Flash, the available alternatives simply aren't up to the job yet, nor are they going to be any time soon.
If you're a fan of open, portable standards and advocate HTML5 and CSS over Flash, please remember how much of HTML5 and CSS3 isn't actually standardised yet. Most of these clever demo pages are based on non-portable, browser-specific CSS, which looks similar to what might one day go in CSS3 but often varies subtly between rendering engines, so the CSS files are full of almost the same styling written in three not-quite-identical ways. How is this any better than the old IE vs. Netscape problems?
For serving video, obviously one of the most important applications of Flash today, please investigate which AV formats are actually supported by which HTML5-capable browsers, including Apple's iWhatever platforms. Bonus points are awarded for identifying the universally supported formats that are not encumbered by any kind of IP issues. (Hint: There aren't any.)
This whole Flash vs. HTML5 video debate reminds me a lot of people who criticise table-based layouts on web pages. There are many genuine advantages of CSS and many genuine problems with table-based layout. However, the anti-table crowd still look pretty stupid when you're talking about some trivial page layout and they are advocating 50-line CSS solutions that work on most browsers from the past three years in preference to 5-line table-based solutions that work reliably on every browser since forever. They look even more stupid when they "justify" their position based on usability and accessibility concerns that most of them have never experienced, with implications they don't even understand.
These things are all tools. We should use the best tool for each job. Hopefully, in time, new technologies and standards will leave behind less useful tools, and Flash will either evolve to keep up or it will die. For now, if you're going to bash Flash, please make sure you have a demonstrably better alternative to suggest first. Otherwise you're just a guy ranting on a forum.
Re:Google Chrome Frame (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget what's available to users. The question was about what's actually installed on users' desktops. I assure you that almost nobody's going to try a hack like Google Chrome Frame or a Firefox simulator plug-in. (Well some people may, but they're the people who are already using HTML-5 compliant browsers.)
Re:Browser as Gaming Platform (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious that the page you link to has an embedded flash video?
Please oh please oh PLEASE KEEP FLASH (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, Flashblock will stop working and all those ads and banners and devil-may-care craziness will be UNSTOPPABLE.
Seriously, how can I strip out HTML5 content that I hate? What plugin can tell what should stay and what should go? Flash is the best thing ever for people who want to enjoy the web, because the Flash elements are easy to detect and discard before rendering.
Re:I can give you one. Because evil never dies. (Score:2, Insightful)
Because you would have been incapable of making the decision to not install Flash on your own?
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Photoshop/Illustrator/etc were often the only reasons people would even consider purchasing a Mac. Is it Adobe's fault that Apple made a bunch of super niche computers at a time when diversity and adaptability were the strong selling points of Windows machines?
Really, look at the pre-iPod years. How many people did you know that used Macs for anything other than graphic design type work? They were THE platform at the time (though I personally never really understood why). Sure, there were people that preferred them over alternatives, but speaking from experience as someone who grew up in Silicon Valley during the 80's and 90's, I would estimate Macs to have maintained roughly a 5% market share among the people I knew.
Apple made their own bed. Not my chair, not my problem, that's what I always say.
I guess he hasn't actually used HTML5 video ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me to be pretty awesome as it means my Mac doesn't sit here and boil on my laptop because Flash is chewing away CPU as fast as it can with no apparent reason.
Every other video app on my mac does fine without eating CPU, its just the awesomeness of flash that makes my laptop get hot.
I've yet to come across a reason to use flash over html5 video.
Not this again (Score:3, Insightful)
Its mainly the Jake2 code [bytonic.de]. And switching from Java to HTML5 caused like what? A 90% performance drop?
Re:head-spin (Score:3, Insightful)
Really?
See: gimp GUI. The continued dumbing down of Gnome. Firefox becoming more and more of a CPU+RAM hog. OpenOffice is a mass of spaghetti code that takes 1,000 times longer than Excel does to open a moderate-size .xls with a lot of formatted fields. The stagnation of Inkscape. The lack of good admin tools for administering LVM. Crappy to nonexistent documentation.
PDF? Widespread in UNIX land, and considering it is a container for Postscript and WYSIWYG, it's pretty darn good for its intended purpose.
Acrobat? For editing already-rendered PDF files, it is hands down the best tool out there. PDFEdit is a steaming pile of crap in comparison.
Photoshop? Show me gimp when it gets a macro recorder and droplets, layer effects, nested layers, a decent UI (as complex as Photoshop's UI is, it is more navigable for most users than Gimp is), vector support, reasonable undo/redo, integrated HDR, edit text in place without losing effects/filters/etc (see: vector support), proper support for higher color depths than Gimp (don't even mention Cinepaint - Cinepaint is so outdated it may as well not exist).
Flash? It makes things possible on the web that a web browser cannot otherwise do - at least without a ginormous CPU manufactured of unobtanium. Say what you will but there is no denying that flash games and other apps perform better than the equivalent HTML+Javascript can do at this time.
Now, I have Adobe CS. I use PDFEdit, Gimp and Inkscape instead, whenever possible. I like the open source tools, but Photoshop is most definitely not bloated. That a program offers features I use and you don't, and vice versa, does not equate to bloat. It's a matter of picking the right tool for a job.
If I have a complex image where layer effects would make sense, I'd launch Photoshop and Illustrator to make the task go faster. What takes 30-some-odd steps to create in Gimp, and then re-doing the "effect" with slight variations requiring undoing and redoing the same steps with slight tweaks can often be done in literally 2-3 clicks in the Adobe suite.
Now, if all you want to do is take an image shot with a crappy Kodak P&S camera and remove red-eye and resize the image to post on social network sites, sure. Photoshop is overkill and Photoshop Elements or even Paint.net would be more appropriate. But, if you need the capabilities of Photoshop, it certainly is not bloated.
It's dead Jim.. (Score:5, Insightful)
But not for the obvious reasons. Flash is going the same way as all of Adobe's other software, this is a trend I first noticed about the time of Photoshop 8 (ooh, history brush, I'll pay for that). Adobe has no good programmers left. I don't know if they fired them all just before that time, or they bailed, but ever since then all we've seen out of them is mediocre point upgrades. They're still living off the reputation they built in the mid 90s.
Their shit just plain doesn't work, or is old codebases patched into oblivion, and they either don't want to, or can't hire people talented enough to fix and improve it.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:1, Insightful)
The iPad doesn't have the cpu guts to render HD video - it downscales it to 1024x576 - not even the 1366x768 of the crappy HDTVs, and way below 1920x1080.
Nice try douchebag, but to scale video is MORE INTENSIVE than rendering it at the video's native res, the iPad plays back 720p video just fine because it uses hardware acceleration.
Funny how even the cheapest netbooks can do it
funny how the iPad can play back 7-6 hours of 720p video on a single charge, while a netbook goes flat playing back less than 2. I know which I'd rather on a long flight
here's two reasons... (Score:5, Insightful)
two reason why flash *should* die:
1. spyware
2. malware
i really don't care if flash has better optimised code right now, and can play videos faster. even ignoring the fact that my CPU and GPU are more than capable of playing any kind of video without breaking a sweat, it's far more important to me that my computer NOT run arbitrary, untrusted code from any web site i visit that either spies on me or tries to install malware like keystroke-loggers or spambots (fortunately, i'm fairly safe from the latter as i run only linux - it's more offensive than dangerous).
i know that i'm taking a stupid risk every time i allow noscript and flashblock to play a flash video, so i try to avoid it...and will keep doing so until HTML5 videos are the standard. data is (mostly) safe[1]. arbitrary executable code is not.
(i really don't think i'm missing much - youtube and the like are, after all, subject to Sturgeon's Law like everything else)
i still think the most appropriate analogy to describe web users running arbitary code from web sites they visit is to say it's like jabbing yourself with every needle on the ground as you walk by a junkie squat - you might enjoy some kind of a high, but you'll certainly get infected. it's why i use NoScript and only allow sites i trust to execute javascript....and give up immediately on sites that don't work at all without js....web sites should degrade gracefully and still work in basic form without scripting, even if it is a more primitive "experience" than what you get if you allow scripts to run.
[1] maliciously created data files could cause a buffer overflow or something in the player - but the code for that is under MY control, not the web sites'. it can be fixed ONCE and protect my computer from all future attempts to exploit the same bug.
Re:Jobs isn't betting his platform on it... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a false premise, I'm merely supporting the idea that consistent user experience is more valuable than checking off features on a list. I don't believe that a 1% use case necessarily warrants inclusion. You could say the same about floppy drives. Or for the few people who had to buy new mice when their laptop didn't have a PS/2 port anymore.
I'm coming at this from two sides... for one, I genuinely find Flash on Android to be unusable. Some of the usability issues can be fixed, but some are inherent in the media model. For another, I've worked with Flash for ages, both design and dev, and it's just painful. Even the newer Flex runtime has never been able to shake the shackles of the underlying tech. It's crappy, unreliable and full of legacy bloat.
So, I'm not holding my breath for Flash as the new premier mobile development solution. Partially because there are already better solutions out there (e.g. Phonegap), but also because the key to good mobile is to develop with full awareness of your environment, and that will always be platform-specific. I'm thinking about Android's modular Activity/Task architecture... about iOS multitasking... about being aware of screen orientation, of connectivity, of media playback, of phone calls.
You can't plonk monolithic SWF movies in the middle of that and pretend it's the same. As for AIR, it's essentially WebKit with all the cool bits ripped out, and replaced with crummy Adobe crap... I'll pass.