I have had some interesting discussions over the last few months about HTML 5, Flash, and Silverlight. Flash technology has become a catalyst mobile platforms to use against Apple to get market share.
Here are the facts about Flash:
- Flash eats up a lot of system resources, and has gotten worse over the last 5 years.
- Though I am not a Mac user, apparently Flash is a nightmare on a Mac.
- Mobile devices that run Flash, do so primarily through bruit force thanks to the processing power of today’s latest mobile devices.
- Flash support for mobile features will only get better as phones get faster and Adobe invests the resource to keep Flash alive and kicking.
- Mobile devices will only get more powerful as vendors battle for market share which is good for Flash.
Flash is widely adopted thanks to video and vector motion graphics which HTML 5 will ultimately replace on the web.. This I have no doubt. I think people are underestimating the time that this will take primarily because the HTML 5 standard is still under development. Media and PR hype machines give visibility and escalate the importance of HTML 5 because it is the only open standard that all major software vendors agree on as the future of the web and how consumers will interact with it. It does not however speed up the process where HTML 5 reigns supreme and Flash dies, which is what I read and hear people regurgitate on a weekly basis. The stakes are higher than ever so all vendors with major skin in the game are fighting to ensure their technology is relevant. For Adobe, Flash is their only proprietary stake in the web Adobe will need to improve Flash.
As a technologist and software vendor I am left scratching my head because I have yet to see any indication how vendors will replace Flash in the areas of BI when it comes to rich internet applications and dashboards. A growing trend that I see is duplicate efforts to re-purpose Flash content as other on-device friendly formats. My feeling is that specialized applications like Xcelsius, which are widely accepted in the enterprise will continue to thrive, though as time moves forward if Flash does completely die on the internet it will be perceived as “old technology”. For now, we still continue to use Flash when it is the best possible tool for the job but it is important for any software developer or vendor to consider what the mobile implications are for building content in Flash will be.
Ryan,
I’m not quite sure what the point of this article is. Maybe just venting about people who are ideologues on one side or another?
In any case, I’m not sure I understand the premise. Doesn’t “better” depend on the goal? Sometimes I want my visualizations to run on the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. This means no Flash and no Silverlight. On the other hand, someone else might want to use Adobe content creation tools to develop their interactive visualization, and right now that means Flash (though it seems this is changing with increased support for HTML, Canvas, SVG, and Javascript as output formats in Adobe tools).
I find that usually the power of the platform is in the tools and libraries available for it. Right now, I think Flash is still better on the tool front because of the Adobe content creation tools. But I think HTML/Javascript/SVG/Canvas (HTML5 to many) is better on the library front, with libraries like Protovis and Processing.js, as well as a growing developer community (I believe Javascript just passed Ruby as the most popular development language on Github).
Ethan
You may want to read it again. I had saved a few thoughts as a draft and didn’t realize it went live, so you went through an un-complete thought… sorry about that
For Android and RIM devices, Flash is an option and it is still too early in the game to count anyone out…including Microsoft. You nailed it right on the head in your assessment of the concept of “Library” and I couldn’t agree with you more.
My problem is I hear people say “HTML5″ as if a markup language is the magic bullet that will kill off Actionscript, which is a well adopted object oriented language (Actionscript is the Flash programming language). Essentially it is HTML5 capabilities like canvas coupled with Javascript, and CSS that will free the web of Flash, but will not replace the rich internet applications and Flash based tools any time soon. You can retrofit many of the Java or .NET tools with new features thanks to HTML5 but the process will be significantly slower than the open web.
At the end of the day it is about choosing the right tool for the job, and the intent of the article is to continue pushing information in plain English based on my experiences using these technologies every day rather than from someone who is paid to re-publish articles fed through PR driven initiatives.
I greatly appreciate the comments and hope that others share their experiences.