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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 re

by 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?
    - philh 17y ago
      My claim is that IE's market share will not become insignificant for a long time. You seem to have read it as "IE will retain nonzero share for a long time".
- edw519 17y ago
  "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." Sounds like you forget to include the 100 million enterprise desktops locked down to ie by their employers.
  - huherto 17y ago
    IE is the standard where I work. Still lots of people just go ahead an install Firefox.
  - megaduck 17y ago
    Actually, that's what makes them like NetWare. If IE fails to keep up, those dominos will eventually fall, albeit slowly. There's still huge NetWare shops (like the California Energy Commission), but they're ever-so-slowly dropping away. Install base doesn't matter. Growth rates do.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
A lot of people use "HTML5" in a very vague manner. One of the principle goals of HTML5 is to fully reverse-engineer and document some of Internet Explorer's behaviour so that the other browsers can duplicate it (even in failure scenarios). So a fair bit of HTML5 is already implemented by Microsoft whether they like it or not. Some other aspects of HTML5 have indeed been adopted by Microsoft and implemented in IE8. http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=trident&eras=All&cats=HTML5&statuses=rec,cr,wd,ietf http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=trident&eras=All&#3... What's going to "kill" Flash and Silverlight, is specific parts of HTML5 such as audio, video and canvas tags which Microsoft have no interest in supporting as it's against their business interests. Both the need for a Microsoft desktop OS and Silverlight are called into question by useful web standards. What will (continue to) happen is people using whatever bits of the standards they can and falling back to some mix of Javascript, Proprietary IE features and/or Flash. This is standard operating practice for any serious web development. How do you think Google can use SVG in it's maps when that's not supported by IE?
- cjbos 17y ago
  Falling back can be very expensive though when you start to talk about things like Video & Audio, where the cost to create and maintain different formats of large media assets is high.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Interestingly you can deliver vorbis audio natively, via Java, and via Flash 10 (see https://launchpad.net/fogg https://launchpad.net/fogg), so for audio you only need one format for 99% coverage. And despite that fact no-one talks about it, Vorbis is actually state of the art, competitive with both AAC and AAC-HE at their respective sweet spots but without the problem of AAC-HE degrading badly on decoders that only support AAC (e.g. Apple stuff). (Vorbis is also patent clear, used widely by big companies, well supported in hardware, and music seems to have moved away from DRM so it basically trumps every objection made to Theora.) For video, though people like to talk about H.264 as if it was a single codec, it's actually a family or toolkit designed to go from web video on small portable devices up to Hollywood Blue-Ray on 100" projector televisions. (I've seen people seriously claim Theora is unsuitable as a standard web codec because it doesn't handle film grain as well as H.264. Film grain!) Unfortunately you can't encode one H.264 stream that'll work on everything as encode and decode complexity ramp up harshly as you move up the profiles. I predict that since the iPhone (and similar) is the hot platform right now, and it doesn't have Flash, you'll see a lot of places following Kroc Camen's lead and encoding twice, one for Theora and one for iPhone compatible H.264 which will then be deliver by Flash for non-Theora platforms. http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody The kicker here is that iPhone compatible H.264 is far from the best possible quality you could squeeze out for desktop use, but is more than good enough for most folks so the two videos will be basically equivalent in quality.

by sarvesh 17y ago

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?
  - philh 17y ago
    My claim is that IE's market share will not become insignificant for a long time. You seem to have read it as "IE will retain nonzero share for a long time".
edw519 17y ago
"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." Sounds like you forget to include the 100 million enterprise desktops locked down to ie by their employers.
- huherto 17y ago
  IE is the standard where I work. Still lots of people just go ahead an install Firefox.
- megaduck 17y ago
  Actually, that's what makes them like NetWare. If IE fails to keep up, those dominos will eventually fall, albeit slowly. There's still huge NetWare shops (like the California Energy Commission), but they're ever-so-slowly dropping away. Install base doesn't matter. Growth rates do.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

A lot of people use "HTML5" in a very vague manner. One of the principle goals of HTML5 is to fully reverse-engineer and document some of Internet Explorer's behaviour so that the other browsers can duplicate it (even in failure scenarios). So a fair bit of HTML5 is already implemented by Microsoft whether they like it or not. Some other aspects of HTML5 have indeed been adopted by Microsoft and implemented in IE8. http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=trident&eras=All&cats=HTML5&statuses=rec,cr,wd,ietf http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=trident&eras=All&#3... What's going to "kill" Flash and Silverlight, is specific parts of HTML5 such as audio, video and canvas tags which Microsoft have no interest in supporting as it's against their business interests. Both the need for a Microsoft desktop OS and Silverlight are called into question by useful web standards. What will (continue to) happen is people using whatever bits of the standards they can and falling back to some mix of Javascript, Proprietary IE features and/or Flash. This is standard operating practice for any serious web development. How do you think Google can use SVG in it's maps when that's not supported by IE?

cjbos 17y ago
Falling back can be very expensive though when you start to talk about things like Video & Audio, where the cost to create and maintain different formats of large media assets is high.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  Interestingly you can deliver vorbis audio natively, via Java, and via Flash 10 (see https://launchpad.net/fogg https://launchpad.net/fogg), so for audio you only need one format for 99% coverage. And despite that fact no-one talks about it, Vorbis is actually state of the art, competitive with both AAC and AAC-HE at their respective sweet spots but without the problem of AAC-HE degrading badly on decoders that only support AAC (e.g. Apple stuff). (Vorbis is also patent clear, used widely by big companies, well supported in hardware, and music seems to have moved away from DRM so it basically trumps every objection made to Theora.) For video, though people like to talk about H.264 as if it was a single codec, it's actually a family or toolkit designed to go from web video on small portable devices up to Hollywood Blue-Ray on 100" projector televisions. (I've seen people seriously claim Theora is unsuitable as a standard web codec because it doesn't handle film grain as well as H.264. Film grain!) Unfortunately you can't encode one H.264 stream that'll work on everything as encode and decode complexity ramp up harshly as you move up the profiles. I predict that since the iPhone (and similar) is the hot platform right now, and it doesn't have Flash, you'll see a lot of places following Kroc Camen's lead and encoding twice, one for Theora and one for iPhone compatible H.264 which will then be deliver by Flash for non-Theora platforms. http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody The kicker here is that iPhone compatible H.264 is far from the best possible quality you could squeeze out for desktop use, but is more than good enough for most folks so the two videos will be basically equivalent in quality.