Uncompiled Thoughts

My previous post on the Flash controversy brought up some interesting comments that I thought warranted further discussion. A number of bloggers have shared their opinions as well. Incidentally, this conversation has been going on for months on the web, the iPad announcement just seems to have reignited it.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch posted:

We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs. Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web. This is being accomplished via the Open Screen Project, where we are working with over 50 partners to make this a reality across a wide array of devices. For example, the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1.

That sounds pretty neat, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Adobe has had years to deliver a solid experience on Linux and Mac OS X and hasn’t managed to successfully achieve that. Cross platform compatibility is only growing more important as the web moves from desktops towards phones, tablets, and netbooks: more devices and platforms that Adobe will have to maintain support for. I wonder how well they can pull it off on mobile phones with even more limited CPUs, memory, and battery life. After all, Flash has never been particularly great at memory management. Or CPU consumption.

Frankly, I wouldn’t want a Flash experience on my smartphone if the consequence is drastically reduced battery life. (Although contrary to Apple, I would like the option to choose for myself. I would simply choose to turn Flash off). In the end, I need my phone to work as a phone, which means being on all the time.

Longer term, some point to HTML as eventually supplanting the need for Flash, particularly with the more recent developments coming in HTML with version 5. I don’t see this as one replacing the other, certainly not today nor even in the foreseeable future.

Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

Really? The dark ages of the web were driven by Internet Explorer’s inability to properly implement basic HTML and CSS standards, and the fact that their browser had such a massive market share due to being shipped by default on desktop operating systems. Developers were forced to add special support for IE6, but none of them were particularly happy about doing so.

But at this point in time, are things still the same? Does it still make sense to judge the pace of browser innovation and standards adoption with the same perspective as when Microsoft had a death grip on the browser market?

I would argue that the pace of browser innovation has accelerated, and will continue to accelerate, with Mozilla, Apple, and Google driving that innovation. Something that Microsoft was not particularly interested in doing.

• The mobile web is continuing to grow, and is predicted to overtake desktop browsing in the next few years. And the leaders in that space aren’t running IE.
• Internet Explorer’s browser share on the desktop is continuing to decline, while other browsers continue to grow. (Admittedly slower than I would prefer.)
• With the rise of modern browsers and mobile operating systems, the average time between user browser upgrades has been significantly decreased due to automatic updates. I upgrade Firefox all the time (rather, it upgrades itself completely painlessly without any real effort on my part). This supposed advantage of the Flash plugin is now native to the browser itself.

To me, this is what is really exciting about the web right now. The excitement over HTML5 is not about whether it can or will replace Flash. Flash is obviously an entrenched platform that drove innovation during a period where browser innovation was completely stagnant (post IE/Netscape, pre Firefox/Chrome/Safari) and isn’t going away anytime soon.

The excitement is due to the fact that browser innovation is occuring again, in a standards compliant fashion, driven by companies like Apple, Google, and Mozilla. It marks a distinct contrast compared to several years ago when Microsoft’s dominance basically halted all browser innovation, creating an environment where Flash was required in order to display video/rich media on the web.

These days, people are building some really neat apps based on Javascript/HTML, and I expect to see many more, as browser adoption continues to grow and the tools get better:

http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/
http://280slides.com/Editor/
http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/

No one is saying that the shift to HTML5 will happen overnight, and no one is saying that Flash will become irrelevant overnight. But HTML5 will iterate more rapidly now that Webkit is a major priority for both Apple and Google, the compatibility issues with video codecs will be sorted out over time, browsers will continue to add new, innovative features, and developers will continue to build useful tools and really neat websites around those features.

I’m glad that Flash was around to push innovation when the status quo was IE6 and the browser space was stagnant. But times have shifted, we are inching past the era of crippled browsers that made Flash necessary in the first place, and innovation is happening elsewhere.