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Flash’s Future Fades as Windows Close on Adobe | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Well, that'll be it for Flash as we know it then.
Microsoft are dropping it from the latest Windows Mobile. Not that Windows Mobile has more than a couple of percent of the market, but when Microsoft makes a move like this, people stop treating Apple as simply evil (which they are, but not because of their attitude to Flash) and start to believe what is pretty obvious to anyone who has tried using Flash on an Android device, struggled with a computer that is nearly dead from exhaustion through running a Flash video, or accidentally left a Flash animation running in the background on a machine running on batteries. Flash doesn't work. It used to be a good idea and a neat solution to a gaping hole in the web, but it is now bloated, insecure, unreliable, slow, keeps rendering historical versions incompatible (I've long suffered from running Flash on Linux). It just doesn't fit any more. And it's boast about running on more machines than anything else was always stretching the truth way way way beyond credible bounds.
Adobe are adopting a sensible exit strategy by making it easier to produce other formats with their flagship tools, including HTML5 and apps that can transfer fairly directly onto iOS.
Apparently 68% of video is now free of Flash and HTML-5-ish so, though there is still a niche for simple interactive games etc, there's not far to go before it has gone the way of ActiveX and embedded Java, ie. largely irrelevant.
Jon Dron
Comments
Flash's strength has always been it's greatest weakness: it's really easy to start developing Flash applications. Unfortunately this means a lot of people are building Flash applications that are programmed poorly with the results that Jon lists here. For example, the app running in the background that continues to drain the batteries is a notorious problem. If the programmer put the app in a dormant state when it goes to the background then it wouldn't continue to use CPU resources. It's a simple thing to do but not something that a lot of Flash "developers" bother with.
Flash now supports H.264 video using the GPU so it is as efficient as HTML5 video (no more battery draining). In fact it's possible to play the same H.264 video file through the Flash player or the HTML5 web browser with the same performance. What isn't possible with HTML5 video is to poll the network connection and play a version of the video that's maximised for the available network throughput (which Flash can do). You can have multiple versions of the same video on a server and send high resolution to a fast desktop machine or low resolution to a mobile device with the end user completely unaware. In the case of a computer on a shared network, if the network speed degrades then the Flash player can switch to the lower resolution version without interruption and switch back to high res when the network improves. This is not possible with HTML5 video. In addition, HTML5 video is restricted to progressive downloading rather than true streaming. If you have a 30 minute video running through HTML5 you need to receive all the data between the start of the file and any point you wish to jump to later in the file. For a high definition HTML5 video it might take 10 minutes to jump forward 20 minutes in the video. With Flash streaming you can jump anywhere in the video with a maximum 1 or 2 second delay.
Flash video offers a number of other advantages over HTML5: the video can have close captioning. Cuepoints can be assigned to times in the video allowing the programmer to develop an interface with chapters and buttons to jump to those chapters. Invisible buttons can be overlayed on the video allowing the viewer to click on a person in a video scene and receive a complete biography of that person.
Just a few other points: The Flash development environment deploys to Windows, Mac, Blackberry Playbook, iPad/iPhone, and Android. (I've just completed porting a Biology learning activity to the iPad.)
The current beta of the Flash Player adds:
- GPU-accelerated 3D graphics (XBOX and Playstation quality).
- reatime video capture, H.264 compression and server upload (video/podcasts directly from the browser)
Also, Adobe Connect, the University's designated video conferencing environment runs on top of the Flash Player. Flash has its faults but it is still the most feature rich web delivered development environment available.
- Chris Manuel