In conflicting blog posts today, Adobe says/refutes that Flash is its future
Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe penned a post on Adobe's blog today defending Flash as the de-facto standard on the web for interactivity and video playing. Lynch comes to Adobe from Macromedia where he was Chief Software Architect and obviously has been with Flash longer than even Adobe. Therefore, it isn't surprising to hear him say that he doesn't believe HTML5 will replace Flash at anytime in the foreseeable future.
Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.The productivity and expressiveness of Flash remain advantages for the Web community even as HTML advances.
The Flash team will drive innovation over the coming years as they have over the past decade to enable experiences that aren't otherwise possible. With the ability to update the majority of Web clients in less than a year, Flash can make this innovation available to our customers much more quickly than HTML across a variety of browsers.
The general consensus in the Apple community (including CEO Steve Jobs) is that Flash can die, the sooner the better. But does that mean Adobe has to die with it? Adobe makes authoring tools which could be used to make HTML5 applications instead of Flash applications (though if Adobe Dreamweaver's capability in the HTML world is any indication, they have a long way to go).
John Nack, Principal Project Manager for another Adobe product, Photoshop, says precisely this:
Adobe isn't in the Flash business. Seriously. It isn't in the Photoshop business, or the Acrobat business, or the [take-your-pick product name] business, either. It's in the helping people communicate business. We'd all do well to remember that, because it means that the company's fortunes are tied to building great tools for solving problems. If we do that well, we prosper; if we do it poorly, we fail. When we get too wrapped up in this technology or that, we lose touch with the problems that we (and more importantly our customers) are trying to solve.
The equation is simple. Adobe wants to make money selling tools, so it needs our customers' clients to pay for work done with the tools. Clients won't pay if their customers can't see the work made with the tools. Therefore customers, clients, and by extension Adobe need a way to see the work, be that videos, interactive pieces, or anything else.
Just like the new Flash tools have the ability to export to moving GIF, flat HTML or even iPhone App, they could also be used to export to HTML5. Here's an example of video entirely done in HTML5. Why can't I take a video file on my computer and embed it as such? Somewhere buried in the code on that page there is a MP4 just like the ones on my computer.
Don't worry. There will soon be tools to embed your HTML5 video into your websites. In fact, I'd be surprised if YouTube and the other video sharing sites don't have a "Embed HTML5" code spitter-outter this year. It is clear that Adobe, if they want to stay relevant, will start building tools like this.
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Comments (21)
OK right there will be tools to export video but as long as there is no real standard for html5 video there is a problem.
firefox is going with ogg theora and webkit is going with mpeg4 (proprietary, patented and not completely royalty free in few years...)... so as a publisher i have to do twice the encoding work and spend twice the webspace on a vid for html5 video? why should i? html5 video is a nice gimmick for mac users but in the real world nobody cares.
Actually there are only OGG and H264 variation of HTML 5 video so far.
If browsers can support JPG, GIF, PNG some even support BMP and TIFF, I can't see why they can't support 2 video formats.
Summary:
If Adobe doesn't make great HTML5 tools, someone else will. And that'll kill Adobe.
Gee, it would be nice if the HTML5 demo worked! I have Safari 4.0.4 and tried twice to get the demo to play. I am not a big Adobe fan, I think they could do a better job designing their software and they are very high price. But, give the lack of a good HTML5 demo, they still seem to be the only game in town. And, Apple really needs to get down off their high horse and put the user/customer first. At least for now!
Works on both Chrome and Safari for me.
@Mark
Go here: http://www.youtube.com/html5
That's YouTube's HTML5/h.264 Beta. Works prefectly for me.
And go here: http://vimeo.com/blog:268
that's Vimeo's HTML5 beta. Haven't tried it yet.
So there are two good HTML5 video demos for you.
I really wish they'd quit calling it HTML5 video. All HTML5 does is add a <video> tag. The video is either Ogg Theora or h.264.
I also don't buy all this whining about which codec to support. Does the <img> tag require only one image format? No, it works with GIF, JPG, PNG, and others. Webkit works fine with Ogg Theora with the free Xiph Quicktime Components, available here: http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/
As far as I'm concerned, the problem is solved and works. Flash and its crappy performance and crashes can die AFAIC.
We (web developers) don't need Adobe to create tools so that we can embed HTML5 video in a page. That is done by adding as little as one line of HTML with the 'video' tag. Admittedly the harder part is encoding the video to a supported format. But that has to happen today anyway, and if all it takes is one additional encoding (e.g. to Ogg Vorbis format and h264) in order to cover the universe of HTML5 aware clients then that is no big deal.
Read more @ diveintohtml5.org : http://bit.ly/c8c7OW
I don't need to pay Adobe for anything to accomplish this.
If Adobe wants to sell tools, let them create tools which output the rich flash games, or silly animated splash screens, using open standards like html5 + canvas + SVG + CSS + EcmaScript (JavaScript). What people don't get is that increasingly we don't need proprietary plugins.
Adobe won't do that though because they *want* us to be locked into their closed ecosystem of expensive tools for generating non-standard proprietary content.
Flash is crap. Get over it, it's technology of the last decade/century.
No one NEEDS Flash, it's just a fancy penis enlargement replacement for designers and website owners without real content who want to show off.
The web existed before Flash and will exist without it.
End of story.
video worked for me... very nicely.
Not to mention Flash is a friggin CPU HOG on the Mac platform! How 'bout you fix that crap Adobe?!?!?! That said, the sooner Flash goes away, the better! And I used to be a hardcore Flash fan!
Flash can have very good quality, however it also allows video to be compressed too much, and this is the majority I find on the internet. The sound really suffers the most, with high quality and low resource requirements HTML5 spec video will quickly dominate.
Whatever you can say against Flash, nobody is changing their entire websites to avoid Flash when they have already invested a lot of time and money on making it Flash compatible.
HTML5 might be something good in the future but as of now and for a long while it won't do not even closer to what Flash does.
Problem is that on the Mac side Flash is even worse than on the MS world. Sure Flash isn't the best thing that has happened, but nothing have come to replace it. For Apple insisting on not supporting Flash is just childish (something I don't believe) or greed: they want you to buy your games through the appStore on iTunes instead of using all the free games there are that requires Flash.
I can agree that Flash consumes a lot of resurses, sure, but I can't buy Apple's not very openly posture of having a device that will offer "the best web browsing experience ever" when you're not going to be able to see ITS contents as a whole, and actually the important parts you want to see will be replaced by a broken plug-in icon.
If in 5 years the world had moved to anyother technology than Flash, then Apple can be ok by not offering Flash but if you're buying their iPad is for using it TODAY because we all know in 6 months as it always happens with Apple's products, it will be obsolete, not to mention waiting for years with the same device to finally be able to really browse the Internet.
Crap is what Apple is doing with the iPad: no multitask, no flash, very limited storage capacity, not a pen, not even usb ports, no sd, etc., they can show a very nice device, shinny, lovely but worthless.
If they're not adding Flash they're going to fail. It has been like "accepted" on the iPhone/Touch devices but won't happen on the tablet market, the rest of the devices they're compiting against are Flash capable, multitasking, etc.
my company already phased out flash on our website in 2009.
It simply uses too much bandwidth. When it loads, it always causes the browser to pause. And it has trouble with Gzip.
overall, really annoying.
Okay, are you looking at the iPad through the eyes of a (uninformed) geek? The iPad is not a desktop replacement if you are - lets say - in the IT business. But millions of people just like to surf/chat/email/listen/watch on the couch. They don't need a computer, they need an appliance that just works.
I use my iPhone for that, but the screen it often a bit to small... if only they would make a bigger iPod touch.... ah, they just did.
I hear you say “it can’t do multitasking”. But what is Multitasking precisely?
You mean that you can’t run program X in the background (ie. listening to Pandora) while using program Y (ie. Pages)? Okay, that is not possible on the iPhone/iPad(?). Perhaps never will be for third-party developers.... because of the battery drain AND because developers often think they need multitasking/background-processes when they actually can solve the issue in other ways (remember the Push Notification Service?)
You also hear them say that you, for instance, can’t use Mail and Browse the Internet at the same time. Well, I cannot use Mail and browse the Internet *at the same*?! time on my laptop. I need to switch to the appropriate application first.
On the iPad (or iPhone) you can switch between Apps and continue where you left off, copying data between them. Not all iPhone/iPad Apps do that properly, but that is because they don’t follow the programming guidelines. When Apps have a persistent state, they are able to Multitask like most people perceive multitasking. So.... I don't need multitasking, I need persistent state!
I can only think of one situation where you need process-running-in-background multitasking, and that is listening to music.
The iPod app has got that covered. (Again, yes, you can’t use Pandora).
hey you, I can't really understand your reply, are you being sarcastic or something? Ok, you cannot even do email and browsing at the same time on your desktop cause you have to switch apps... WOW. That is not multitasking. On your desktop you have opened at the same time those 2 apps and you can switch them back and forth and everything's fine. You cannot do exactly that on your iPhone. You have to close one app and launch the other, then close it and go back to the previous and load it again. Yes, you can keep the email you were writing and paste the link you just copied on Safari, still, that is not exactly multitasking. Push notifications is a good approach.
About Flash sure I know it kills your resources. I know it consumes a lot, I am not an idiot. What I am saying is that most websites have Flash content, not only advertising or nice presentations. They even have menus, games, video, etc., so if you're buying a device to primarly surf the net, email and chat, well, you won't be able to do that the way you would.
Actually they kind of want this to go to students to have their books in there. Think about any student who has not a Facebook account. Think about any student who uses Facebook and does play any of its applications like farmVille or SuperPoke! Pets just to mention a couple (mafia wars, zynga poker, whatever), so, they won't be able to check their farm, clean their pets, whatever. You might call it silly, you might say it is not that important, but for a lot of people IT IS. And mostly, if you're using it for enterain yourself then you should be able to do it. If you're more like on the geek sites, plain text, still tree-directory forums and all that, ok, that's fine, should Apple offer the opportunity for you to turn on/off Flash and that's it.
Microsoft has if I am not mistaken, a "multitasking" form that offers you the ability to have like 3 apps opened on the same time. A USB is kind of a must but I could live without it. Capacity is really limited and their chip is a new one nobody knows for sure how good it will perform.
The rest of the devide is nice. It's a nice ePhoto viewer (but it is $500 the lowest). You can read your newspaper only if you have the newspaper app or if your newspaper doesn't offers Flash content.
Sure I know some are moving away from Flash, but the product is for being used today and as of now, like it or not Flash rules the web, no everywhere, but almost. Sure I might get the "get your MS tablet then" response but thing is first I hate MS as much as all of you and we are talking about how squared minded they're acting by not offering this and then saying that HTML5 is the way to go. Ok, go and when finished and everybody on that, then ok.
death to flash! flash sucks and we all need to grow up and move on. for fooks sake, let us send adobe a message - kill flash, embrace the future!
that video doesn't work in Opera.
so far flash is the best thing.
Well, yes it doesn't as it clearly says that supported browsers are:
Safari (v4.0.4+)
Google Chrome (v4.0+)
Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed
so far Flash is widely supported as it's been around a while... however, as HTML5 catches on, I expect Opera will have to get its act together to support it...
Most people I know have multiple browsers... why don't you download a secondary one! make your pick!
Personally, I say HTML5 is the future... flash is indeed slow, crappy and a major resource hog!
I think the biggest change will be seen if the online Advertisers will create their banner without flash. Because there is the money, you can earn in the internet business. My guess is that there will be changes in till 2011 because google (doubleClick)& Eybblaster one of the biggest third party AdServer will get in trouble with the growing bandwith the need to deliver due to flash, but since there is a ongoing price war they need to reduce those cost. And the publishers will follow quickly on this.
If you look at all aspects Adobe has to change their software to go ahead and talk to apple again since they refuse this apple won't do anything. (And I understand it since Adobe didn't deliver any flash plug in (for MAC)which wasn't buggy -> I know they always tell us about the GPU thing they do on the Windows side, but that can just be a joke if you have so many developers you can't just blame one none existing framework which is the problem, you must find other way around if you are really committed to your product and your users)
This doesn't mean apple users of the iPad will have problems in future or adobe will get in trouble because of not supporting flash on the iPad.
I still think the iPad will be a success for apple without flash, developers will use new technologies like CSS 3 or HTML 5 as well as flash, and those targeted customers are not the high profiled users -> and if so it'll only be the 2nd system to their real notebooks ;). Sites which where build entirely in flash don't make money for now and they won't be in the future since they aren't dynamic enough to insert Ads.
I still don't think it's about the games or the video itself since Apple doesn't make money out of this and now one else does when it's free on the internet...
Apple really tries to give users, who aren't nerds, best user expirience you can get out of this small machine.
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