The HTML5 boom is coming. Fast

'HTML5' is losing all meaning and just becoming a buzzword.

"HTML5 is not just going to be big, it’s going to be huge — and it’s coming fast.

More than 2.1 billion mobile devices will have HTML5 browsers by 2016, up from just 109 million in 2010"

No, more than 2.1 billion mobile devices will have web browsers. Yes, they'll use HTML5 but the figure is significant because of users gaining access to the 'full web' on fast 3G connections- that has nothing to do with HTML5.

"Much of this growth will be thanks to Apple’s massive support for the HTML5 platform, according to the study. And Apple is also likely to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the technology’s wide scale adoption. "

Actually I'd argue that Apple has done some of the biggest damage in harming HTML5 adoption. Their refusal to make HTML5 a first-class citizen in the app-writing world (and Android is equally as guilty of this) means that people are still being funneled through Objective-C pathways, locking their apps into the iOS platform.

"Because Apple has so much control over its software and devices, it will be most poised to take full advantage of HTML features as they emerge in the coming years."

Or, they'll be poised to take full advantage of their market position and make it very difficult to write any kind of cross-platform app. We'll see.

The only thing that will keep Flash alive even once HTML5 is pretty much universally supported will be the content control Flash has. With the or tag, all you have to do is view the page source and you can download anything. I think companies like Vevo will fight hard against that.

I see your point and I agree that big companies will probably want an offering which provides some content control, but I don't think that flash (or anything else) does or can do a good job at this. It's hard to have open standards for DRM since most content protection relies heavily on security through obscurity.

Youtube's HTML5 player is still very alpha and poorly designed (still no fullscreen?). It has hardly changed in over a year since it was released.

I question Google/Youtube's commitment to moving to HTML5.

Where do Flash games come into this? I'm not very familiar with the development of a flash game but some guy in this article claims "Flash will disappear" or something. I assume this means whatever source the games have will just be compiled into some other sort of file compatible with HTML5? Or am I missing something completely?]