
Demo: FireFox 3.5 Treats Videos Like Web Pages. Why Can’t Flash Do That? - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/demo-firefox-35-treats-videos-like-web-pages-why-cant-flash-do-that/
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tdavis
I hate to be the cynic in the room, but I kinda doubt I'll be alive by the
time all this cool new HTML stuff becomes ubiquitous enough to warrant wide-
spread adoption. I mean, come on, I'm still supporting IE 6. I was doing that
a decade ago. Maybe another 10 years and IE 7 is gone. Maybe another 30 and
HTML5 is both complete and implemented across all browsers. So maybe I'll be
alive, but I doubt I'll be working.

~~~
dflock
The Day One Keynote from this years Google I/O conference covers all this
html5 stuff very well and demonstrates that this is all available right now,
if you pretend that Microsoft doesn't exist. They demo the Firefox 3.5 stuff,
and they also demo an internal test version of YouTube that just uses HTML5
<video> and no plugins, which looks awesome. Dailymotion already have one of
these: [http://blog.dailymotion.com/2009/05/27/watch-videowithout-
fl...](http://blog.dailymotion.com/2009/05/27/watch-videowithout-flash/)

Firefox 3.5 is coming out very soon and auto-update means that your can expect
80%+ of Firefox users to have updated within a few months. Firefox 2 usage is
now practically zero, for example. Safari is in the same boat and also
supports most of the same HTML 5 stuff that FF3.5 does, as does Chrome. Most
of the cool bits of HTML5 should be widely available by the end of the year:
video & audio tags, local storage, web worker threads, etc... You can start to
rely on this stuff being available by the end of the year, if you pretend that
Microsoft doesn't exist.

The CSS and javascript frameworks that are rapidly maturing (like YUI, jQuery,
Dojo etc..) have really eased my browser support burden over the last year or
two. I can now rapidly code something up using YUI reset-fonts-grids, add
fancy effects with jQuery and have it work first time cross browser, from IE6
to Chrome. Using these tools has made cross browser dev. time plummet. Older
browsers are slowly fading in usage and development cost, which is excellent
news. There are other tools like Google Web Toolkit (GWT - which was used to
build the Google Wave UI, amongst other things) which are more comprehensive
still and introduce a different, browser agnostic, way of developing web apps.
These tools really help you to pretend that Microsoft doesn't exist.

In addition, I think the adoption of the multiprocess model for web browsers
which Chrome is leading the charge on, along with IE8 (and Mozilla are talking
about it), is going to cause a bit of a shakedown in the plugins space. With
plugins running in a different process, people will finally find out how often
they crash. Once people are visibly shown that 50%+ of what used to be (masked
as) browser crashes are actually plugin crashes (mostly flash), then I think
attitudes may change. It will certainly put extra pressure on plugin vendors
to fix their busted crap, anyway. People often underestimate the power of
simple things like this, just shining a light on a previously hidden problem
can often make it shrivel away.

The elephant in the room is obviously Microsoft, who are far more interested
in pushing their proprietary Silverlight plugin, so that they can shift more
Visual Studio licences, then in any of this other stuff. They've amply
demonstratetd with the extended undeath of IE6 that they hate and fear web
applications, don't know how to respond to them and would far rather
purposefully cause the whole web to stagnate forever, than see web
applications become successful. Hopefully we can succeed in spite of them, or
gain momentum and drag them along anyway, kicking and screaming.

Google pitched Wave at IO as a 'killer app.' for HTML5 - something cool and
useful to drive adoption. Everything that I've seen leads me to believe that
this might well work. Google have a really deep understanding of the web and
know that everything that's ever really succeeded on the web has been both
open and distributed, so they've built Wave that way.

Either way, it's a pretty exciting time to be doing web development! If you
haven't watched any of the stuff from this years Google IO, then you really
should at least watch the keynotes:

[http://video.google.com/videosearch?oe=UTF-8&sourceid=na...](http://video.google.com/videosearch?oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=google+io+2009&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=g84vSu3wHcvRjAfk0cWXCw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title#)

~~~
dflock
I just found this, which is the (rather limited) youtube html5 site, as demoed
in the Google I/O keynote:

<http://www.youtube.com/html5>

No Plugins at all! Try mousing over the thumbnails of the related videos.

Tested and works in Midori (<http://www.twotoasts.de>). Apparently works in
Firefox 3.5, and presumably, anything else which supports HTML5 <video>
(Chrome on Windows, Safari, etc...)

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tjmc
The demo is impressive, but Flash absolutely _can_ do all those things, albeit
in Actionscript rather than Javascript. In fact that's the reason Flash has
largely replaced all the other video plugins like Quicktime and Windows Media
Player. They weren't customizable. Flash is.

Now, being able to do that customisation natively in Javascript is awesome,
but the issue of HTML5 adoption is a much bigger problem and it's even worse
now that there are competing codecs. Adoption of any Ogg format is usually a
good indication that the pointy heads have won over the pragmatists. H264 is
the more sensible choice for video.

~~~
godDLL
Yes, is impressive; no, not all of those things, but most (I see you know your
ActionScript 3.0); Theora is improving faster than H.264 (which is not
improving) and so will surpass it eventually – without the royalty issues; I
agree with you on all points _if we are taking into account only the scope of
the next two years_ – but we should be thinking a bit further into the future.

~~~
tjmc
I'd be very surprised if HTML 5 gains mass market share within 2 years.
Unfortunately, the majority of businesses simply standardize on the browser
that ships with the desktop OS they use. That's why IE6 is still so pervasive,
as most businesses use WinXP on the desktop. I suspect the next large
corporate migration will be to Win 7 desktops and IE8 which again means no
support. Mac users on Safari may have support but it'll be H264.

The problem here is one with all technology - adoption rates drop
significantly when a good enough solution is already in place. Flash does
video well enough that most people won't see the need to change.

