Is Flash Going Down?
Friday, February 5th, 2010
The recent announcement of the iPad and the experimentation with HTML5 by YouTube and others led people argue about whether or not Flash is necessary, or even good at all, for the Internet. Apple has announced that, just like the iPhone, the iPad will not support Flash. YouTube and a number of websites have started testing the use of HTML5 video instead of Flash to playback web video.
Many people are vocally against Flash because it is a proprietary technology that is controlled by Adobe. People think the web should be built using open standards such as CSS and HTML. Images on the internet do not need a special plug to be played and are placed directly on a web page, the new HTML5 will make it possible to embed a video inside an HTML page the same way an image is placed. As Flash is the most popular method for delivering video on the internet, a lot of people seem to believe that the arrival of HTML5 will be the end of the Flash video era. A number of modern browsers such as Chrome and Safari already support the HTML5 video tag and websites such as YouTube and Vimeo started testing it for delivering video.
There are a lot of compatibility issues with HTML5 video tag and it will take a very long time (years) before it can become a serious alternative for Flash video. The HTML5 video tag enables embedding a video directly onto a web page, but there is no actual standard video format for the web and there is no consistency in the support of video codecs by browsers. The majority of video codecs are restricted by use licenses and no format is currently universally supported.
Apple refuses to have Flash on the iPhone because it fears that it will negatively affect the user experience due to its tendency to consume the system resources, however, all other smart phone platforms (Android, Palm, Windows, and Blackberry) have announced that they will support the new Flash Player 10.1 which has been developed for mobile and touch based navigation in mind. Apple also will not support Flash on its upcoming iPad tablet even though it will come with a new powerful processor that is capable of delivering a desktop like browsing experience.
Instead of waiting for Apple to reconsider its position, Adobe announced that the upcoming version of Adobe Flash Professional, CS5, will enable developers to use Flash CS5 and ActionScript 3.0, the same tools used to create Flash on the web, to create native iPhone applications. This means that Flash developers can use their existing skills and easily create smart mobile phone applications that will run on the iPhone, Android, or the desktop web, using a single SDK with very little changed between each different platform version of the same application.
It must be remembered that Adobe does not make money off the Flash Player, but by selling development tools such as Flash Professional and Photoshop. Adobe creates a number of tools, such as Dreamweaver, that work with web standards such as HTML5. The video tag is very unlikely to have any significant impact of the use of Flash for delivering video on the web anytime soon, and even if it did, it should be remembered that Flash is not just a medium for delivering video, Flash is the most popular method for creating web games and other rich interactive content. Many popular web services such as TweetDeck, Google Streetview, Picnik, are built on Flash and they don’t have anything to do with video.
The fact that the iPhone and the iPad do not support Flash is not the end of Flash, for the real customers of Adobe, the developers, Flash can still be the a good option for developing applications, especially due to the ease at which applications created using Flash can be ported to multiple platforms (including the iPhone) easily!
