In the thread about the new Apple iPad, it has been opined a couple of times at least that Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash is on its last legs.
I’m not at all interested in turning this thread into another argument about whether Apple is right to snub Flash, but I am interested in the truth of whether Flash really is on the way out.
I’ve heard it said that Flash is buggy and bloated - if this is true, it hasn’t ever really come to my attention, but I’m prepared to take that a given, or discuss it here if there are differences of opinion.
I don’t believe Flash is a good solution at all for the production of an entire website - I have found most Flash-only websites (often belonging to design agencies) to be frustrating and awkward, although I think there probably are one or two well-executed examples out there (notwithstanding that they are not fully accessible to all users and all platforms).
Acknowledged that streamed online video no longer requires Flash on many sites - and I have no particular opinion on whether this is good or not, because neither way worked better or worse than the other, for me.
But what about all the game and cartoon sites out there? Are they going to just die a death? How else can content like that be presented?
Is Flash really in its death throes? If so, what will replace it (in every context, not just streamed video)?
The argument seems to be that a due to a combination of standards based HTML5, AJAX, VIDEO tags and improvements in the speed of Javascript, the use of Flash (and MS Silverlight/Moonlight) will decrease.
However, the inability of the W3C steering committee to settle on an unencumbered video standard (Firefox supports the free theora codec, most others prefer the patent-encumbered H.264) and the unwillingness of content providers to support some browsers (Google/Youtube are in beta for HTML5, but with H.264, cutting off Firefox) means that Flash will remain as a multiplatform solution of choice for many sites.
iPhone/iPod/iPad not supporting Flash has been a powerful force against it. Flash is the domain of “laptop sites”, the sort of web site that looks good on the designer’s laptop when demoing it for a client, but are virtually useless in the real world. But such sites are becoming less effective as the folks who write the checks for web development have become web users themselves. And when the customer has an iWhatever and tried to see the demo site and finds that it either doesn’t appear, or they get page that tells them that their new favorite toy is somehow not new enough - the designer gets an angry phone call, which is never good for business.
If it makes any difference, Andriod* doesn’t have flash either. They say it’s coming out in the next month or so, but Andriod* had been around for a while now.
*I’m assuming Android in general doesn’t support it, all I know for sure is that my Verizon Driod running Android 2.0 doesn’t work with flash sites.
Mobile browsers have pretty much always been a compromise in one way or the other though - so people sort of expect that things won’t work on them.
What I want to know is, if Flash dies as prognosticated, what will become of the genre of online browser-based games like Club Penguin, all the stuff at Miniclip etc - is there another viable cross-platform technology that is capable of picking up the torch?
What I don’t understand is that apparently people like Steve Jobs hate Flash because it’s a CPU hog that makes their platforms look sluggish. But they control the platform, the OS – why can’t they make it so that Flash processes are limited in how much CPU they can consume? Is that beyond the wit of Apple system programmers? Make a version of Safari that ring-fences plug-in processes.
If you do it that way, you still get a lot of people who say “When I play my Flash games on my Apple, they look sluggish, when they’re fine on Windows!”.
I hate Flash and wish it would just go away, but at the same time, there’s definitely still a niche for it now and will be for the forseeable future.
I don’t think you understand the problem. The reason it makes the platform look slower is that the Flash apps themselves already run too slow on low-end hardware. Throttling the CPU for Flash apps is not going to help that, as that will just make Flash apps run slower.
It’s not like people will be multitasking Flash and something else, and want that something else to be faster.
Anyways, I really don’t see a big reason to replace Flash for anything other than videos, simple animations, and interactive websites. Actual games and even flash-based cartoons (ala HomestarRunner.com) don’t really need to use something else. They just need to be as optimized as they were in earlier versions of Flash. (Or maybe we can just encourage everyone to just use Flash 7, and let the open source ports take over.)
I also don’t know how well moving to non-Flash video is going to work. We already have video that doesn’t require flash in the form of RealVideo, Quicktime, and Windows Media, as well as others. It was the fact that Flash was already installed on most people’s computers anyway that let Flash video become so ubiquitous. The only way it can be replaced is if the standard itself includes something for such video, and a Flash or Java app is created to provide backwards compatibility for people who won’t upgrade their web browsers. Oh, and if Microsoft actually keeps up their trend of moving towards standard compliance.
Finally, I wonder about people who want to keep their code proprietary. I’ve seen obfuscated Javascript, and I’m still not sure it rises to the level of complexity of actual compiled code like Flash or Java. I fear most companies would balk at having to use code that they would perceive as easier to steal, especially with the large amount of downloadable content that (as far as they are concerned) requires DRM. And a lot of that downloadable content is video.
Flash is difficult because a lot of people turn it off. I have my browswer set not to play Flash unless I tell it to.
This means if you put things in your website that are Flash you might be missing an audience. To some degree Flash is what hurt Java so much.
Webpages depend on speed and Flash works well with speed, but the results with anything but over 3.0mbs in speed are mixed. Too mixed to make it a constant to use.
I wouldn’t say it’s in decline, but like Java, something will come along to replace it or Adobe must come up with a way to make Flash useable by everyone.
This is confusing. Do you think that when and if Flash dies that all the existing software out there automatically deletes itself from every computer? If Flash dies all that will mean is that Adobe will stop updating the software and companies will gradually stop writing code that uses it and websites will stop providing content with it. Anything that exists and works now will always continue to work so long as you have the same software installed.
It depends on the circles you run in. Flash can make a perfectly adequate web experience (In this case, the iMac G4 my kids had been using just fine), and turn it to mush (when said computer was given an internet connection) This was a computer that was used in it’s previous life at the NY film academy to edit film.
Flash makes my Netbook cry.
That said, if you have kids, and they go to kid like sites (Disney, Nickelodeon, Lego.com) Flash is unavoidable…The menu is flash, the Ad on the right is flash, and the content in the middle of the page is Flash.
If websites stop providing content with it, that would include the websites they are asking about. If Flash has died, and is thus rarely used on new pages, fewer and fewer people will actually have Flash, and the website will not be able to count on people actually having Flash, and will have to change to something else or die.
I think the question is what will that technology be that take over the functions that those particular sites use Flash to accomplish. And I don’t think Javascript and HTML 5 will be sufficient. Especially since part of the reason to get rid of Flash is that it is has such high system requirements. And I don’t think a script-based system can reach higher efficiency than a code based one. Not even Flash is coded that poorly.
I don’t have any actual data, but consider the context of your question. Flash debuted in 1996. Think about the sheer number of games and more importantly Flash based video players on the Web right now compared to the preceding 14 years. Use of Flash has increased astronomically in just the past 5 years since Youtube was created, along with Hulu and all the broadcast networks’ sites and newspapers’ sites, etc.
Recently a few browsers have started supporting elements of HTML5, even though the HTML5 specification isn’t final, won’t be final for years, and began in 2004. To take all that and say it’s on the decline or is in its death throes seems to be both incredibly optimistic and also considering an extremely unrealistically narrow time frame.
Personally, I’ve seen no evidence that Flash is declining. I have seen a lot more use of Ajax in recent years - but then, you get Flex (Flash + Ajax) too, so it’s not necessarily replacing Flash, but augmenting. I do some data visualization work, and nothing I’ve seen really approaches Flash for easily getting relatively simple graphic interfaces online and running. Sure, there are other solutions, but the sheer ease-of-use that Flash offers (as long as you don’t try anything complicated) means that it’s going to have lots more content, which means more reason for everyone to keep updating Flash player. Really, unless Silverlight takes off, I don’t see Flash losing ground in the near future (and Silverlight’s really in the same category as Flash, from what I’ve heard).