5 ms·

HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight?

21 points by 10ren 17y ago

anigbrowl 17y ago
How many more threads on this nebulous question?! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661030 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661030 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679886 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679886 ...and several other related threads. Here is the answer: Yes, if enough people adopt it sufficiently fast. But they probably won't. The end. Here is the meta answer: if sufficient articles are written on the subject, recession-weary programmers will learn the new thing to gain an edge because they're worried about developing for a dying platform, and the more innovation will take place on the new platform than the old. In that regard, the recession is good for HTML5 because it raises the economic stakes for developers.
- timdorr 17y ago
  A big, key component is the creation of proper tools for building HTML 5 apps. If someone could start building an HTML 5 tool that makes simple Flash-style animations as simple to build as Flash itself, that would dramatically increase uptake. As it is right now, you really need to be a programmer to use it. Microsoft has realized this with Silverlight and has working on these kinds of tools for the next release. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more use of it once those tools are out there (which I'm fine with, since it seems faster than Flash in my experience).
  - mishmash 17y ago
    But it's still owned by Microsoft, which isn't okay in my experience. ;)
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    When you say "simple Flash-style animations" did you mean to say "annoying advertisements"?
  - cjbos 17y ago
    Right now the biggest industry tool for building standard-based websites is still Dreamweaver from Adobe. Interesting to see if they will be quick to add HTML5 features to Dreamweaver to stay ahead of the curve, or try to protect the Flash platform by being slow to add the features.
    - 10ren 17y ago
      Adobe really impress me as a company who has been through that territory a few times, starting with fonts in postscript, way back in the mid 80's I think, only 2-3 years after the company's formation. With their recent(ish) acquisition of Flash (Macromedia), they also opened up the Flash fileformat and protocol (yeah, flash is an open standard), which seems to me to have been intended to deflate nascent open source alternatives. (If you haven't heard of them, it's measure of the success of Adobe's strategy.) I think Adobe is adding support for HTML5 as we speak (or and perhaps a standalone product); that it will only release it when it is strategically advantageous to Adobe; that it will protect Flash by improving it beyond the features available in HTML5. Note how Photoshop has managed to stay ahead of the Gimp.
GHFigs 17y ago
What is this obsession with things killing other things? It doesn't even make sense metaphorically.
- buugs 17y ago
  It does, as death is basically being obsolete in the technical world.
sarvesh 17y ago
No. This is the fifth story about HTML 5 that has made it to the front page in the last 24 hours and as much as I want to it to replace Flash and Silverlight realistically speaking it won't happen anytime soon. If anybody really believes that IE will implement HTML 5 anytime soon they seem to have a very short memory. Like it or not unless Microsoft decides to implement HTML 5 it isn't going to take off.
- megaduck 17y ago
  I'm not so sure that IE is that important for forward-looking development. It has a rapidly diminishing marketshare on the desktop, and that trend looks likely to continue. Firefox has a staggering amount of momentum right now, and Safari is gaining as well. Moreover, IE has no presence on the iPhone, Palm, Symbian, or Android. That's tens of millions of new devices that Microsoft has zero leverage over. Unless they pull a real miracle out of their hat with the upcoming Windows Mobile, Microsoft is going to be a bit player in the uber-important mobile market for the foreseeable future. IE will likely linger for a long time, but at this point it's looking a lot like Novell NetWare ten years ago: still big, but not driving the market.
  - philh 17y ago
    I suspect IE's market share will never go below X% (where X is high enough to be significant) as long as it's the only browser bundled with Windows and Windows itself has most of the desktop market. As long as that's the case, businesses will have to support it. IE may not be driving the market, but can still hold it back.
    - megaduck 17y ago
      It'll only hold you back so long as you're wanting to capture 100% of the potential market. Obviously Facebook and Google can't afford to give up any potential customers, but a lot of businesses can. How many websites have you seen that demand IE? That was acceptable because IE was a majority, and offered certain features like ActiveX. Once IE becomes a minority, isn't it reasonable to demand that users of your HTML 5 application use something else?
flashstillalive 17y ago
HTML5 and JS, as-is, don't quite match all the capabilities of Flash(perhaps Silverlight too, but I have less familiarity there). This is not to belittle the fact that the feature gap is definitely narrowing, but as long as the incumbent Adobe can continue adding strong reasons to stay on Flash and Flash supports "the majority" of client platforms, support isn't going to completely crumble. In Flash 10 the features have included optimizations in the form of typed arrays, some 3D+shader support, and fully client-side file save and load operations. These things are all missing in our present-to-near-future HTML/JS platform, so I think Adobe knows the plot here quite well.
- moe 17y ago
  Don't forget Flex/AIR that let you develop hybrids for the browser and desktop. Flash has slowly matured out of the "punch the monkey"/videoplayer/games niche over the last years and the >90% installed userbase is not going anywhere soon. I despise adobe and the various problems (linux plugin) like the next guy. But still I'm using it for a lot of frontend work - simply because creating a RIA with HTML and Javascript is like peeling your eyes out with a spoon. HTML5 won't change that fundamentally, at best it's a babystep into a welcome direction.
  - moe 17y ago
    Downvotes without comment are just lovely. I realize this is not a popular opinion ("OMG, he defends flash!"). But unless you have worked with both HTML/JS and Flash/Flex it'd be great if you could at least add a comment to your vote.
    - WilliamLP 17y ago
      Agreed. I work with Flash developers, and the way they work is so many light years different from how web programmers work that I wonder how anyone can think it's even comparable to HTML/JS at all.
diN0bot 17y ago
flagged as duplicate and dumb.
DannoHung 17y ago
Why hasn't anyone developed a plugin for Internet Explorer that loads a modern rendering engine? That way, getting someone to install an HTML5 compliant browser would be as simple as downloading the Flash plugin.
- WilliamLP 17y ago
  Then you'd have to get IE6 users to install the plugin. The fact that they don't bother to upgrade in the first place tells you something.
  - DannoHung 17y ago
    But they'll go to the Flash website to install the new plugin when it tells them to. I think it's the difference between a little dialog helpfully pointing the way to the software they need to use (and the icon that they click on still being the same) and having to actively seek out an upgrade.
billybob 17y ago
I think the only thing that can hold up HTML5 - like other web standards - is IE. But as others have noted, IE has tiny market share on mobile devices, and, I suspect, less among young people than old. So here is a winning scenario: mobile web use continues to grow. Sites that target young demographics use HTML5, and their core users are fine with it. As they grow in popularity, IE is forced to support the standard as it becomes obvious that it's "that sucky browser" if it doesn't.

21 points by 10ren 17y ago

How many more threads on this nebulous question?! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661030 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661030 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679886 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679886 ...and several other related threads. Here is the answer: Yes, if enough people adopt it sufficiently fast. But they probably won't. The end. Here is the meta answer: if sufficient articles are written on the subject, recession-weary programmers will learn the new thing to gain an edge because they're worried about developing for a dying platform, and the more innovation will take place on the new platform than the old. In that regard, the recession is good for HTML5 because it raises the economic stakes for developers.

timdorr 17y ago
A big, key component is the creation of proper tools for building HTML 5 apps. If someone could start building an HTML 5 tool that makes simple Flash-style animations as simple to build as Flash itself, that would dramatically increase uptake. As it is right now, you really need to be a programmer to use it. Microsoft has realized this with Silverlight and has working on these kinds of tools for the next release. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more use of it once those tools are out there (which I'm fine with, since it seems faster than Flash in my experience).
- mishmash 17y ago
  But it's still owned by Microsoft, which isn't okay in my experience. ;)
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  When you say "simple Flash-style animations" did you mean to say "annoying advertisements"?
- cjbos 17y ago
  Right now the biggest industry tool for building standard-based websites is still Dreamweaver from Adobe. Interesting to see if they will be quick to add HTML5 features to Dreamweaver to stay ahead of the curve, or try to protect the Flash platform by being slow to add the features.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    Adobe really impress me as a company who has been through that territory a few times, starting with fonts in postscript, way back in the mid 80's I think, only 2-3 years after the company's formation. With their recent(ish) acquisition of Flash (Macromedia), they also opened up the Flash fileformat and protocol (yeah, flash is an open standard), which seems to me to have been intended to deflate nascent open source alternatives. (If you haven't heard of them, it's measure of the success of Adobe's strategy.) I think Adobe is adding support for HTML5 as we speak (or and perhaps a standalone product); that it will only release it when it is strategically advantageous to Adobe; that it will protect Flash by improving it beyond the features available in HTML5. Note how Photoshop has managed to stay ahead of the Gimp.

GHFigs 17y ago

What is this obsession with things killing other things? It doesn't even make sense metaphorically.

buugs 17y ago
It does, as death is basically being obsolete in the technical world.

sarvesh 17y ago

No. This is the fifth story about HTML 5 that has made it to the front page in the last 24 hours and as much as I want to it to replace Flash and Silverlight realistically speaking it won't happen anytime soon. If anybody really believes that IE will implement HTML 5 anytime soon they seem to have a very short memory. Like it or not unless Microsoft decides to implement HTML 5 it isn't going to take off.

megaduck 17y ago
I'm not so sure that IE is that important for forward-looking development. It has a rapidly diminishing marketshare on the desktop, and that trend looks likely to continue. Firefox has a staggering amount of momentum right now, and Safari is gaining as well. Moreover, IE has no presence on the iPhone, Palm, Symbian, or Android. That's tens of millions of new devices that Microsoft has zero leverage over. Unless they pull a real miracle out of their hat with the upcoming Windows Mobile, Microsoft is going to be a bit player in the uber-important mobile market for the foreseeable future. IE will likely linger for a long time, but at this point it's looking a lot like Novell NetWare ten years ago: still big, but not driving the market.
- philh 17y ago
  I suspect IE's market share will never go below X% (where X is high enough to be significant) as long as it's the only browser bundled with Windows and Windows itself has most of the desktop market. As long as that's the case, businesses will have to support it. IE may not be driving the market, but can still hold it back.
  - megaduck 17y ago
    It'll only hold you back so long as you're wanting to capture 100% of the potential market. Obviously Facebook and Google can't afford to give up any potential customers, but a lot of businesses can. How many websites have you seen that demand IE? That was acceptable because IE was a majority, and offered certain features like ActiveX. Once IE becomes a minority, isn't it reasonable to demand that users of your HTML 5 application use something else?

flashstillalive 17y ago

HTML5 and JS, as-is, don't quite match all the capabilities of Flash(perhaps Silverlight too, but I have less familiarity there). This is not to belittle the fact that the feature gap is definitely narrowing, but as long as the incumbent Adobe can continue adding strong reasons to stay on Flash and Flash supports "the majority" of client platforms, support isn't going to completely crumble. In Flash 10 the features have included optimizations in the form of typed arrays, some 3D+shader support, and fully client-side file save and load operations. These things are all missing in our present-to-near-future HTML/JS platform, so I think Adobe knows the plot here quite well.

moe 17y ago
Don't forget Flex/AIR that let you develop hybrids for the browser and desktop. Flash has slowly matured out of the "punch the monkey"/videoplayer/games niche over the last years and the >90% installed userbase is not going anywhere soon. I despise adobe and the various problems (linux plugin) like the next guy. But still I'm using it for a lot of frontend work - simply because creating a RIA with HTML and Javascript is like peeling your eyes out with a spoon. HTML5 won't change that fundamentally, at best it's a babystep into a welcome direction.
- moe 17y ago
  Downvotes without comment are just lovely. I realize this is not a popular opinion ("OMG, he defends flash!"). But unless you have worked with both HTML/JS and Flash/Flex it'd be great if you could at least add a comment to your vote.
  - WilliamLP 17y ago
    Agreed. I work with Flash developers, and the way they work is so many light years different from how web programmers work that I wonder how anyone can think it's even comparable to HTML/JS at all.

diN0bot 17y ago

flagged as duplicate and dumb.

DannoHung 17y ago

Why hasn't anyone developed a plugin for Internet Explorer that loads a modern rendering engine? That way, getting someone to install an HTML5 compliant browser would be as simple as downloading the Flash plugin.

WilliamLP 17y ago
Then you'd have to get IE6 users to install the plugin. The fact that they don't bother to upgrade in the first place tells you something.
- DannoHung 17y ago
  But they'll go to the Flash website to install the new plugin when it tells them to. I think it's the difference between a little dialog helpfully pointing the way to the software they need to use (and the icon that they click on still being the same) and having to actively seek out an upgrade.

billybob 17y ago

I think the only thing that can hold up HTML5 - like other web standards - is IE. But as others have noted, IE has tiny market share on mobile devices, and, I suspect, less among young people than old. So here is a winning scenario: mobile web use continues to grow. Sites that target young demographics use HTML5, and their core users are fine with it. As they grow in popularity, IE is forced to support the standard as it becomes obvious that it's "that sucky browser" if it doesn't.