

The best way for Adobe to save Flash is by killing it - stevenwei
http://www.stevenwei.com/2010/01/31/the-best-way-for-adobe-to-save-flash-is-by-killing-it/

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krakensden
The reason that the Flash authoring tools work in a sane manner is because
there is a single, consistent runtime that they target.

There is a vast graveyard of tools that tried to wrap html and javascript so
you could make reasonable GUI authoring tools. To my knowledge they were all
plagued by consistency and performance problems, or placed severe limits on
what you could author.

This is less of a way forward than it is a pipe dream, no matter how promising
Canvas looks.

~~~
stevenwei
Yes the existing tools are pretty awful... but they're generally made by small
companies that don't know how to build tools, building on the _current_
implementations of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Has anyone given it a real shot,
targeting the newest features of HTML5?

Adobe on the other hand has built industry standard tools over and over again
(Photoshop, Illustrator, etc). They've proven that they can export their apps
to other platforms (iPhone). What they're not so good at is building open
browser runtimes...

~~~
poppysan
I'd argue that they are good enough at building browser runtimes that theirs
has 90%+ market saturation, and is an industry standard.

Now open is another issue...

~~~
radley
Seriously? Did Adobe beat you guys up and take away your computer? Did they
say "no no no mine?"

Where is the "not open" you guys claim? Flex SDK + Eclipse == free Flash
development.

I swear HTML5 fanatics just make stuff up these days. You'll use Windows,
Flickr, Google, and Hacker News - all privately owned systems. But god forbid
Flash is bad because... why?

~~~
stevenwei
Open != free.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that is less stable and slower on Mac and
Linux that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly utilize cookies on
non-IE browsers that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose
to do so.

Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly return HTTP status
codes on OS X that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose
to do so.

~~~
batterseapower
I think your comments here are off base.

The SWF standards (and associated standards like RTMP) are available for free
on the Adobe website. You are permitted to construct alternative
implementations based on this specification. I think it meets the definition
of an open standard.

Would HTML not be an open standard if the only browser we had was IE, and it
was horribly buggy? No - the quality of the available implementations is
irrelevant to a standards "openness".

------
oliverkofoed
HTML5 is not a valid alternative to Flash. Sure, there is some overlap between
them, but there are way more differences.

It's (like so much else) like comparing an apple to an orange.

~~~
bad_user
The implementations may differ, but the main use-cases are the same. So it's
like comparing an apple to an orange when you want to choose a healthy
supplement to your diet ;)

~~~
benologist
The anti-Flash crowd with their fantasy about how HTML5 >= Flash are missing
one phenomenally tragic detail ...

We're going to have HTML5 for the next _twenty years_ \- and right now it's
only a _sometimes_ substitute for Flash. If you think HTML5 is going to meet
your requirements for the next 20 or more years.. well, assuming you're
pushing 30 like me we're actually going to be close to retirement age by the
time HTML5 is fully replaced by it's successor.

Arguing Adobe should kill Flash for HTML5 is the same as arguing the W3 should
kill HTML5 for HTML 2.0 - it's 15 years old, how's it stack up against your
requirements today?

Technology has never stood still for the W3C and market penetration to catch
up, and 'kill flash' is betting that this time it will ... silly.

~~~
glhaynes
"We're going to have HTML5 for the next twenty years..."

Everybody's going to get up to speed with implementation of HTML5 and then ...
stop? The story of HTML5 so far has been a mix of browsers chasing/leading the
standards. In other words, the standards and the browsers are evolving
together rapidly. I don't see why that would stop anytime soon. Certainly all
this innovation won't ground to a halt when HTML5 submits their final release
to the W3C (or whatever the next "formal" step is at this point).

Will there be some instance of an installed browser today that will still be
running on a machine somewhere in 20 years? Well, probably... but remember
that guy a couple of years ago that still had a CP/M system running his
business? He wasn't holding anybody back.

And once everybody's on modern, standards-compliant browsers (and thus there's
less friction for upgrading, i.e. there's no more "all our corporate apps only
run in IE6"), I expect far more people will upgrade far more often. The web is
at a really, really exciting time if you ask me.

So: non-Flash web technologies can reliably handle some percentage of Flash
use cases today. Certainly more than a couple of years ago, and that appears
to be about to go up again a lot more as HTML5 sweeps across the web. The
number of use cases that require Flash are going to continue to get smaller
and smaller over time. When will Flash be utterly irrelevant to the average
user? I don't know. But WAY less than 20 years from now.

~~~
benologist
The current standards are a _decade_ old already, HTML5 has been 6 years in
the making and will probably be another 4 or 5 years before it reaches a
market penetration that makes it an generally-viable design decision rather
than what it is now - a device or browser specific option.

Work probably won't even _start_ on the HTML6 specification for another decade
at least while they wrap up all the formalities for HTML5, and identify where
it needs improvement, and slowly discuss and agree on those improvements.
Years after that browsers will start supporting it feature by feature, and
years after that enough users will have access to enough features to call it
mainstream.

That process is _very_ likely to leave us having this same discussion about
whether HTML6 will kill Flash in 2030. Assuming anyone still makes or cares
about any of this stuff that far in the future.

Where we are now with HTML5 the void between HTML5 and plugins (Flash is just
the most significant) is smaller than it's ever been before, but the fallacy
of that argument is that Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, Unity, etc are in _active
development and release cycles_.

They make significant progress year after year, just like desktop software,
operating systems, programming languages etc, and while HTML5 _almost_ catches
up _right now_ this is as close as it's going to get at this time.

~~~
glhaynes
Keep in mind that they don't keep progressing linearly forever because of the
nature of the service that's attempting to be provided -- neither are far off
from being able to do basically all the things that can be done on a 2D panel
attached to a speaker or two: interface device input, 2D/3D animation, sound
effects/music, a bit of local persistence, access to the videocamera,... what
else is there? I'm not sure of each's multitouch API, if any, but, really,
there's not that much more beyond those things that HAS to be implemented for
the _vast_ majority of web pages and apps to fully function. Support for
accelerometers and other such devices would be nice, but is hardly important
to reading the New York Times or the other 99.999% of things people do/want to
do with the web. Perhaps in 2030 there'll be argument about whether the web-
or proprietary-way has the best support for holographic 3D displays or
360-channel surround sound, etc., but those and many other things that the two
technologies don't support today seem likely to continue to overall be niche
things. In other words, things whose proper role is a _plug-in_ , not a vital
part of many pages' experience. That's fine: there's going to be a role for
plug-ins for a long, long time, perhaps forever. But, the fundamentals? We're
getting pretty close to having them covered.

Also, I think it's well worth taking a good look at HTML5's rate of progress
over the years. A huge chunk of the HTML5 effort has been toward just
standardizing the response to the tag soup that is out there. That work is
essentially done and doesn't have to be repeated. Just in the last year or two
have things really taken off as far as adding new functionality to browsers
and example pages, and it's only been in the last couple of months that a few
actual commercial pages have started to use these things. In large part,
that's because the web has been _stuck_ for most of a decade because of IE
stagnation. [Also note that the rest of the browser/platform vendors didn't
seem to have a good mechanism to rapidly innovate together on until the HTML5
effort came together. I don't expect that that diplomatic work will have to be
done again, either.] The web platform after the IE stagnation seems likely to
move much faster toward covering the gaps that remain in the web platform.

------
ippisl
So instead of adobe being the monopolistic developer of tools for the
successful flash platform , adobe should compete with everybody else on
developing tools to html5?

This doesn't seem like a great business move, at least not before they tried
everything they can to keep flash important.

~~~
dutchflyboy
But isn't ActionScript completely open? And the flash framework is open too.
You don't need Flash CS4 to use flash. You can also program it with a third
party IDE and then use the free compiler. This would be quite comparable.

~~~
ippisl
what parts of flash are not open? When flash opened those parts you mentioned?
do their knowledge and control of the closed parts of flash enables them to
build better tools? how big a lead did they have for their tools when they
opened those parts of flash ? Are they still today the leader in flash tools
so maybe it's not worthwhile for a competitor to enter?

I really don't know flash in depth , but my guess is that they today have a
big advantage in flash tools and moving to html5 would seriously reduce their
advantage.

~~~
jerf
"what parts of flash are not open?"

The source code of the Adobe Flash plugin, if nothing else.

Incidentally, that does bring to mind one possible Hail Mary that could work:
Open source the Flash player(s). Whether the open source community could fix
performance issues on Linux and OSX depends on a lot of things, but they could
certainly fix some things that would make it less aggravating.

(Since it's probably impossible to open source as-is due to licensing
agreements it still might not work; depends on how much of the plugin is still
left after you've removed those bits.)

~~~
jdowdell
Source: <http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home>

Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and
subsequently used to make Firefox faster.

(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series,
H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for
redistribution by others.)

------
Zak
_It’s funny to me how a few years ago we were all slamming Apple for not
allowing native iPhone apps and forcing us to build web apps, and now we’re
slamming them for forcing us to build native apps_ instead* of web apps! Oh
how quickly we forget…*

I think those of us who are slamming Apple over the iPhone development model
are doing so because Apple is forcing us to do things. I'd be happy if they
kept everything exactly the same, but allowed users to install _any_
application from third-party websites.

------
statictype
I think some people are forgetting that Flash is used for more than just
serving up video and pop-under ads (though admittedly that would be its
largest use).

There are a lot of games that may not be possible to run on an HTML 5 canvas.

Also, lost in this discussion is the fact that one of the more popular
browsers doesn't support HTML 5 in its current version or possibly even its
next.

Does streaming video work under HTML 5 specs? If not, that's another thing
that Flash can do, which you can't with html5.

~~~
robin_reala
_Also, lost in this discussion is the fact that one of the more popular
browsers doesn't support HTML 5 in its current version or possibly even its
next._

Not natively, but <http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/>

_Does streaming video work under HTML 5 specs?_

Yes.

~~~
kierank
_Does streaming video work under HTML 5 specs?

Yes._

Not within ogg/theora it doesn't because there's no way of signaling the
correct amount of data to buffer as used in the buffering mechanisms of modern
video codecs.

------
jawngee
Eh.

The best way for Adobe to save it is to open source the plugin though I
suspect the resulting fragmentation would be a hindrance as well. A
certification process of some kind might be helpful in that regard though.

I'm sure there are patent and licensing issues getting in the way of such a
move.

~~~
romland
I'm sure Adobe will open source the parts of Flash they own.

They will just do it too late for it to make a difference.

------
simonw
If Adobe ever did stop developing / supporting the Flash plugin, it would be a
complete disaster from the point of view of people like myself who think once
something has a URL it should ideally stay accessible until the heat death of
the universe.

~~~
robin_reala
The Flash resource would still be available. If you encode your resource in a
proprietary format then that’s your choice :)

