You could do everything that flash did with IE 5.5/6 tech as well. SMIL 2.0 and VML, in 1999, did all of what flash did
The waters will always be muddied
HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
371–372 of 372 posts
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now Where we are now is that the lock in is so wide that basically everyone is running Chrome, including its competitors.
It's a very different type of lock in. Chrome is based on the open source Chromium anyone can adapt ( sand said competitors, like Microsoft, do), and the vast majority of what it does is based on open standards. If tomorrow Google does something stupid with Chrome, like cutting off adblockers, you can bet your ass there are going to be at least 2 forks within a week. When Adobe did something stupid with Flash, you ha…
Nobody else can maintain a browser anymore, which is why almost everyone else dropped their own engine.
When google announced the "Manifest v3" thing, which does impact ad blockers, people cried, but nothing happened.
Yes, the standards are theoretically open, but concretely nobody else can keep up, Google-the-server launches X and Google-the-client implements it, and than they propose standardizing it but move on anyway, and everybody else plays catchup.
It's not worse than closed source Flash, but it's huge lock in anyway.