Can you survive without Flash?
First the iPad, and now a debate on the relevance of Flash. Apple continues to ignore it and touts HTML5 as the future. Google is also pushing HTML5 on YouTube, with other video sites starting to follow suit. Even Mozilla is disabling it in its new mobile browser, Maemo. Clearly, the death knell for Adobe’s most controversial product is getting louder than ever.
But it’s still all talk, all noise. How about some real action? Thankfully, over at Binary Bonsai, Michael Heilemann has taken it upon himself to drop Flash for the whole month of February as a response to this tweeted challenge:
All those who think no flash on ipad is A-OK please uninstall flash from your current browser, use that for a month then get back to me.
Installing a Flash blocker isn’t really a groundbreaking exercise and is tamer than uninstalling Flash completely, but now is the best time to figure out how dependent we are on it.
So can you survive sans Flash? I won’t go out of my way to defend it nor suffer from withdrawal without it, but the status of HTML5 video alone seems troubling enough.
More importantly, most discussions cover only the question of replacing Flash video, not other applications like games. That would be an even tougher nut to crack, even with the dawn of purely Javascript-based games.
1. Could I survive without flash as a consumer?
Another question: Is there conten I desperately need but is not acessible without flash? Youtube can be accessed without flash. Some other sites not. Do I need them “desperately”? Not really.
Answer: should be possible
2. Could I survive without flash as a web-developer?
Another question: do problems exist that can be solved only with the help of flash?
Hm. A few can be “hacked” with javascript. There do exist more or less successfull approaches to do 3d with javascript, but the quality of flash is still not achieved. Sound is an issue. Even basic sound playback is a big problem for javascript. A lot of “flash-free” javascript games use flash for sound playback (so they are flash games in the end). Not to talk about sound manipulation on byte level, which can be done easily in flash but is impossible in javascript.
A few other things that can be done in flash only: cuepoints in video, alphamasking of video, native image filters, creation of customized and animated filters with pixelbender, etc, etc…
Answer: Impossible.
3. Could I survive without flash as web-user?
Other question: does the web benefit from the fact that there are “proprietary” formats that compete directly with open standards?
HTML does exist for more than 20 years. Now, after this long period, we finally got the canvas tag. If rivalry and competition are the foundation of evolution, it is fair to ask: looking at this incredibly slow evolution speed, would it evolve at all *without* this competition?
Answer: No.
By dirk on February 7, 2010 6:40 am