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At this point, can I count on a user having Flash over Chrome or Firefox? Today, I'd say that a user having Flash is a more reliable bet than them having Chrome

by tomlin 15y ago

At this point, can I count on a user having Flash over Chrome or Firefox? Today, I'd say that a user having Flash is a more reliable bet than them having Chrome/Firefox. And if they have Chrome, they have Flash. I get where you're going, but this conversation always gets dicey. People want Flash to die, so they sit around the campfire dreaming about why it is bad, but fail to see why it has succeeded thus far. If we really want Flash to die, we should be concentrating on advancing the standard (or abandon the slow-moving committees involved). Instead, this rhetoric of how Flash performs, or its inherit proprietary format gets brought up. Over and over. Ad nauseum. And yet Flash – today – outperforms the alternatives in almost every realm of multimedia. Audio API, Camera support, 3D/vector drawing, video decoding, licensing, streaming. Drama and vilification won't change the fact that I still can't allow a user to upload a video with a webcam using standard web technologies – probably not until 2020 (or whatever other gratuitously pushed off date it may be). I still can't reliably build a highly interactive, full-width experience without the browser having a fit. This is the reality.

jensnockert 15y ago
Reality is also that Flash won't be supported in the browsers of mobile devices. The reason that we complain about performance, and the proprietary format, is just because that are the main problems with it. Building without flash is not for everyone, but if you want to support Mobile Safari, or for all the other people without access to flash, you need a javascript solution to the problem. Have faith, even IE will be able to support rich multimedia applications in the future, or it will become irrelevant. That future is starting to become available now in Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
fr0ggerz 15y ago
The debate isn't about whether Flash is more capable than HTML5 - more whether HTML5 is a better 'model' than Flash and when I say better I mean that 1. It is not owned by any one company and 2. You can view the source. Viewing the source has been fundamental to the evolution of the web and it will be fundamental going forward - with Flash you can't do it. Not to mention that Flash's sand-boxed implementation doesn't play nicely with other HTML elements. (Try manipulating Flash video with Canvas). But what the author is really talking about is changing the process of establishing standards - bottom up rather than top down. Give us, the developers the basic building blocks and we will build the rest. It should become obvious then what to implement as a standard, if anything. I recently read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters and although I certainly don't agree with all he says, one paragraph stood out: "Let yourself be second-guessed. When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn't intend, and this is especially true of a highly articulated tool like a programming language. Many a hacker will want to tweak your semantic model in a way that you never imagined. I say let them. Give the programmer access to as much internal stuff as you can."
- tomlin 15y ago
  Adobe sits and thinks about what the next steps are for Flash and web standards organizations sit and think about how to replicate what Flash does – understand the demand cycle. My point isn't that HTML5 sucks, it's that people see it as better than Flash – but it isn't, sadly. That isn't an evangelistic statement, it is a factual one. To push forward, we can't be ignorant. We (as a community) have to look at what Flash does and take it for HTML5 and then come back to the table at least as often as Adobe. Otherwise, Flash will always be better.
  - fr0ggerz 15y ago
    The point is both Adobe and the W3C are guessing. Think how much faster we could advance if it was put in the hands of the community. A community that constantly implements, gets feedback, re-implements, collaborates. You only have to look at three.js (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/) and similar to get an idea of what can be built on a low-level API. [Edit: guessing, not second-guessing]
    - BrendanEich 15y ago
      Having participated in web browser standards for 15 years, in good (competitive) markets and bad, I agree completely, without reservation even though perfection is not an option. The developer community, especially with open source as practiced on github.com, is much better able to path-find better high-level models and APIs. Committees and individual browser vendors are less likely to find the right designs and get them codified as well or as quickly. This is not inevitable. You could have a righteous hacker/designer at a browser company, whose API and implementation are so winning they sweep all before them. Great if this happens, but it's rare in my experience. Thus the apparent paradox of low-level APIs and increasingly very fast JS engines enabling faster and better hacker-community-based de-facto standardization than even the modern browser vendors can achieve on average. Then the standards bodies ideally roll up de-jure standards based on uncontested winning designs. We're in the midst of this, so it's hard to see it in full. It's also slower than some people want, but Flash was not built in a day, or a year, either. Browser vendor "defection" (failure to cooperate in standards bodies on consensus standardization) is an ongoing threat. Competition as browsers merge with mobile and desktop/tablet OS front-sides (home screens) and app platforms is of course still required to keep standards bodies functional.
BrendanEich 15y ago
Just a quick reply to your "I still can't allow a user to upload a video with a webcam using standard web technologies" point. I believe you can or soon will be able to upload video captured on a mobile device in Firefox for Android and the Android stock browser, using <input type="file" device="camera" accept="video/mpeg"/> See http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload.
timc3 15y ago
Flash does not outperform every aspect of the alternatives. The standard flash browser plugin can't even provide frame accurate playback, something that can be done with the video tag in chrome, IE9, Safari and Firefox. It does not out perform chrome's webgl, audio API, video decoding support, except in the cross platform support it offers. The only benefit it has is that it Is common, but there can be version differences on feature support.

by tomlin 15y ago

jensnockert 15y ago

Reality is also that Flash won't be supported in the browsers of mobile devices. The reason that we complain about performance, and the proprietary format, is just because that are the main problems with it. Building without flash is not for everyone, but if you want to support Mobile Safari, or for all the other people without access to flash, you need a javascript solution to the problem. Have faith, even IE will be able to support rich multimedia applications in the future, or it will become irrelevant. That future is starting to become available now in Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

fr0ggerz 15y ago

The debate isn't about whether Flash is more capable than HTML5 - more whether HTML5 is a better 'model' than Flash and when I say better I mean that 1. It is not owned by any one company and 2. You can view the source. Viewing the source has been fundamental to the evolution of the web and it will be fundamental going forward - with Flash you can't do it. Not to mention that Flash's sand-boxed implementation doesn't play nicely with other HTML elements. (Try manipulating Flash video with Canvas). But what the author is really talking about is changing the process of establishing standards - bottom up rather than top down. Give us, the developers the basic building blocks and we will build the rest. It should become obvious then what to implement as a standard, if anything. I recently read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters and although I certainly don't agree with all he says, one paragraph stood out: "Let yourself be second-guessed. When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn't intend, and this is especially true of a highly articulated tool like a programming language. Many a hacker will want to tweak your semantic model in a way that you never imagined. I say let them. Give the programmer access to as much internal stuff as you can."

tomlin 15y ago
Adobe sits and thinks about what the next steps are for Flash and web standards organizations sit and think about how to replicate what Flash does – understand the demand cycle. My point isn't that HTML5 sucks, it's that people see it as better than Flash – but it isn't, sadly. That isn't an evangelistic statement, it is a factual one. To push forward, we can't be ignorant. We (as a community) have to look at what Flash does and take it for HTML5 and then come back to the table at least as often as Adobe. Otherwise, Flash will always be better.
- fr0ggerz 15y ago
  The point is both Adobe and the W3C are guessing. Think how much faster we could advance if it was put in the hands of the community. A community that constantly implements, gets feedback, re-implements, collaborates. You only have to look at three.js (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/) and similar to get an idea of what can be built on a low-level API. [Edit: guessing, not second-guessing]
  - BrendanEich 15y ago
    Having participated in web browser standards for 15 years, in good (competitive) markets and bad, I agree completely, without reservation even though perfection is not an option. The developer community, especially with open source as practiced on github.com, is much better able to path-find better high-level models and APIs. Committees and individual browser vendors are less likely to find the right designs and get them codified as well or as quickly. This is not inevitable. You could have a righteous hacker/designer at a browser company, whose API and implementation are so winning they sweep all before them. Great if this happens, but it's rare in my experience. Thus the apparent paradox of low-level APIs and increasingly very fast JS engines enabling faster and better hacker-community-based de-facto standardization than even the modern browser vendors can achieve on average. Then the standards bodies ideally roll up de-jure standards based on uncontested winning designs. We're in the midst of this, so it's hard to see it in full. It's also slower than some people want, but Flash was not built in a day, or a year, either. Browser vendor "defection" (failure to cooperate in standards bodies on consensus standardization) is an ongoing threat. Competition as browsers merge with mobile and desktop/tablet OS front-sides (home screens) and app platforms is of course still required to keep standards bodies functional.

BrendanEich 15y ago

Just a quick reply to your "I still can't allow a user to upload a video with a webcam using standard web technologies" point. I believe you can or soon will be able to upload video captured on a mobile device in Firefox for Android and the Android stock browser, using <input type="file" device="camera" accept="video/mpeg"/> See http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload.

timc3 15y ago

Flash does not outperform every aspect of the alternatives. The standard flash browser plugin can't even provide frame accurate playback, something that can be done with the video tag in chrome, IE9, Safari and Firefox. It does not out perform chrome's webgl, audio API, video decoding support, except in the cross platform support it offers. The only benefit it has is that it Is common, but there can be version differences on feature support.