Adobe Flash has become apart of our daily web browsing as much as HTML has. But is it as important? Not really.
Flash has had the potential to become something quite great but the most useful thing it has achieved is being the standard for web video and some good online applications. Almost all web video is played through a video player running on flash. Probably it’s second biggest use is ads. Almost all the moving ads on the web today is built on flash even, website’s have been created using just flash.
“So with all the potential that flash has why isn’t it gaining web greatness?” Because its slow, even on modern Intel core 2 duo processors, after having a few videos open at the same time the computer can start to lag. Also normally when a website has been built using flash it takes forever to load and it just doesn’t feel as clean to use as the alternative.
“So why not something else?” Well their isn’t really any other options. Sure you can embed a Quicktime or a Windows Media video but it just doesn’t have the flexibility or features you can implement with creating your own flash video player. “Silverlight?” I don’t have enough experience with Silverlight to comment on it.
It’s not all bad. Flash applications mainly video players have been worked on and worked on most notable Youtube and Viddler’s video players. They both load quick and most of the time run great and have great features like annotations and time line comments. But they both suffer from the same problem and it’s how resource hungry they are. Just decoding flash is just not optimised well enough and his all lays on adobe. Also flash video isn’t a small file. Can be quite large.
“So the future is gloomy?” Actually no, and this is the whole reason I am writing this post, HTML 5, the new revision of HTML. A couple of it’s new features are audio and video. Youtube is demoing it here and I found it quite great. My CPU didn’t spike and for a beta product it was quite nice to use, I could use the video slider and it didn’t skip around (Youtube has fixed this to some extent but it still exists in it’s flash player).
“Great HTML 5 it is then.” ummm no, well not yet. HTML 5 is still quite new and the players still need to be built and popularity needs to be gained. The player that Youtube was demoing had no more features than a Quicktime embed.
Hopefully soon all the major video hosts will follow Youtube’s lead and start using HTML 5 because it sure seems much better than flash. I don’t think flash will die well not in the fore seeable future, their still are many online applications that use flash and you can’t forget flash games but adobe really need to optimise it.
