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Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

isflashdeadyet.com

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Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#11

Post by Jack000 »

I feel like some kind of web luddite for saying this, but does anyone else actually like flash?

yes, people abused it and most flash apps were crap, but now I'm seeing more and more of the same done in css animations/javascript. It's worse too, since most people just do something like jQuery.animate and update the dom every frame.

I personally liked the actionscript 3 graphics api a lot more than javascript + canvas. I did work with it a lot so I could be biased..

The death of a closed platform like flash is good for the future of the web, but some of the hate is undeserved. Hopefully it will have a second life as a desktop app platform.

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#12

Post by finalight »

based on the quote 'Much smarter people have written far more words about this sort of thing; you should read what they have to say.", it seems like this guy is either comparing them to himself or steve jobs

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#13

Post by forcer »

without flash my business would never take off - www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk . There is so far no other technology that would accurately show file download progress

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#14

Post by soup10 »

Flash will probably make a comeback when mobile hardware can support it without burning batteries(I wouldn't count on adobe optimizing it any time soon, making non bloated software isn't in their dna). For all it's faults, flash is an incredibley fully featured authoring tool for 2D multimedia and casual games. Html5 may be technically capable of matching flash functionality, but it's rarely as easy or convenient and requires a ton of wheel re-inventing.

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#15

Post by alternize »

dmcg wrote: post #8

Please edit the title to include 2010, so others can at least avoid the slow realisation as they read the article that this is not a contemporary analysis.

totally agree - I do not see the point in posting (and even worse: upvoting) such outdated links. it would be a different thing if it was regularly updated, but the last update was from nov 2011.

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#16

Post by userbinator »

Jack000 wrote: post #11

I feel like some kind of web luddite for saying this, but does anyone else actually like flash? yes, people abused it and most flash apps were crap, but now I'm seeing more and more of the same done in css animations/javascript. It's worse too, since most people just do something like jQuery.animate and update the dom every frame. I personally liked the actionscript 3 graphics api a lot more than javascript + canvas.…

It's also easy to block Flash (I have it disabled by default), but not so easy to block JS or CSS animations selectively.

Having done some decompilation/deobfuscation stuff I've worked with the Flash file format directly at the byte level, and it's really quite nice and efficient for its purpose - although you wouldn't see that from the direction Adobe's plugins have taken. IMHO it was good when it was still called Macromedia Shockwave Flash.

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#18

Post by gbl08ma »

kijin wrote: post #2

Four years after YouTube started "experimenting" with HTML5, it still uses Flash by default to show me videos on the latest versions of Firefox and IE. If Flash is not installed, YouTube resorts to HTML5 , which seems to play just fine, but still displays a big red warning about the missing Flash. Why can't they use HTML5 by default and resort to Flash if and only if the browser doesn't support HTML5? Why do they hav…

HTML5 YouTube plays just fine on my newish (2 years old) laptop, which has a discreet Nvidia GPU, with Chrome (no matter if I'm on Windows or Linux). However, the temperature of the GPU increases noticeably while watching videos (i.e. it is doing more work) and the speed of the fan increases, too. It's like this with every element I put to play. With Flash, any increase in resource consumption is unnoticeable.

Some days ago I booted my old (5-6 years old) desktop, which only has Intel integrated graphics, with Chrome. In HTML5 YouTube, playback skipped a lot of video frames, and often sound would have interruptions too (especially if I switched tabs or windows and went to do something else). The CPU became much busier. This would happen on both Windows and Linux. With Flash, videos play just fine, and the CPU definitely doesn't get as busy. The version of Chrome is the same on all four OS installs.

Conclusion: while I like HTML5 video much more than Flash video (if not for anything else, because I don't need plugins, even if they are bundled with the browser), it still has a long way to go, as currently it uses much more resources than Flash to achieve the same goal. I believe this is the main reason why YouTube still makes Flash the default: if they made HTML5 video the default, it would play poorly for a lot of people, and make their computers super slow.

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#19

Post by robin_reala »

sneak wrote: post #6

Flash is more alive than ever. Facebook video, Google Street View, half of YouTube - it's amazing to me that Google allows this to go on (or maybe they're just strategizing against mobile platforms they don't make native apps for). Also, almost every video player these days outside of the biggest companies. I recall trying to watch some US govt streaming stuff recently that didn't work. We must continue the fight. Th…

Street view uses WebGL in the current Google Maps. I don’t have Flash installed in my office Firefox and it works fine.

Re: Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

#20

Post by robin_reala »

soup10 wrote: post #14

Flash will probably make a comeback when mobile hardware can support it without burning batteries(I wouldn't count on adobe optimizing it any time soon, making non bloated software isn't in their dna). For all it's faults, flash is an incredibley fully featured authoring tool for 2D multimedia and casual games. Html5 may be technically capable of matching flash functionality, but it's rarely as easy or convenient and…

It really won’t. iOS is never going to support Flash, current browsers are making it click-to-play by default, Adobe shows no interest or ability in optimising the mobile plugin any further and every day advances canvas/WebGL tooling. The best Flash can hope for is maintaining its niche in non-Web interface (e.g. Scaleform UI in games).
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