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The Future of Flash Part II – HTML5 vs Flash

Josh — Fri, 07 May 2010 21:56:56 +0000

Flash vs HTML5

While part I focused on the quarrel between Adobe and Apple, the future of Flash is much larger than the ramblings of an over-dramatic control freak. Flash has been a definitive tool for web interaction. It’s lived through the indirect blow of AJAX by being more animation-centric and object oriented. It’s lived through the increasing functionality of Java by, again, being more animation centric and having a very hands-on design view in the Flash development environment. HTML5 however, is taking direct aim at animation, graphics, video and even 3D applications. Beyond the momentum of the current Flash-comfortable army of web developers, where will Flash sit in the future of the web?

Adobe has proven to be adaptive and intelligent. There is no doubt in my mind that right now, in various offices, at various desks, there are well paid people looking for ways to have Flash outlive this next battle. According to the W3C, HTML5 will reach recommendation by late 2010. That’s not a lot of time to come out with dramatic advances in Flash’s functionality. Lets take a look at where the battle fronts lay.

Video

Right now, there are a number of barriers to entry for placing videos on the web. If you don’t have your own Flash video player, getting one is confusing enough to give up on. Using YouTube or Vimeo has you sign up for an account and be subjected to their quality limit, censoring, upload times, user interface, ads, and terms of service. Windows Media Player embeds are dead due to their poor handling of codecs and even Apple’s .mov “embedding” technique is terrible. YouTube, Vimeo or one of the many other video uploading communities are almost always your best bet.

The W3C thankfully recognizes the web video problem and has brought us the salvation that is the “” tag. Browsers will be able to see video files much like the way they see image files. Video files are however very, very different. The video playback controls for HTML5 are built in (and customizable) but the video file codec is a beggar. While H.264 is a real winner in terms of compression, quality and streaming abilities, it’s a huge mess in terms of legal use. If you want to use the codec for commercial purposes (which so many people would), you have to pay royalties. OGG is the other codec available for HTML5 and is completely free, but not as impressive in quality and compression.

Right now, Flash accounts for around 70% of the web’s video. The biggest player here is YouTube which accounts for around 40% of all web video. While YouTube is the child of Google, who has shown extensive co-operation with Adobe to bring Flash to their mobile platform Android, YouTube has also co-operated with Apple to stream videos in the Apple-friendly H.264 format. It seems YouTube will (rightfully) innovate to keep their grip on internet video, firm. YouTube has already dabbled with HTML5 and was in fact one of the first to offer a demo. You can opt-in to their HTML5 beta here. So far though, HTML5 videos don’t have the in-video ad-showing abilities of their Flash counterparts. Until HTML5 offers a way to do this, Flash will be a part of the YouTube and the overall web video mix.

Verdict: Let’s not lose perspective. HTML5 allows you to embed videos with the H.264 and OGG codecs and has built in controls. Flash is a platform capable of streaming video in a variety of codecs, any video control scheme imaginable, overlays, in-video links, advertisements, subtitles, keyboard interaction.. and… well the list is ever-expanding. Flash’s interactivity both server-side and user-side will earn its place in the future of web video. Both HTML5 video and Flash embedding (via swfObject) offer alternative content. If a browser doesn’t support Flash, it can seemlessly display an HTML5 video in its place.

Read on:

See the HTML5 video tag in action – w3schools.com
H.264 is a codec, Flash is a platform. One can not kill the other. – streamingmedia.com
A developers perspective on HTML5 vs Flash. A little homegrown but good points are raised. – YouTube.com

Animation & Graphics

Unless you seek out things like Flash games, most of a web users experience with Flash animation is (unfortunately) ads. Flash’s ability to distract you is worth billions (I’m definitely not kidding). HTML5 currently lacks the timeline animation environment of Flash, but coded animations could be on par with Flash via a canvas tween library. The idea behind browser add-ons like Flash Block is to protect your web experiance from animated and invasive advertisements. Ironically, it’s because of such programs that there will undoubtedly be HTML5 animated ads. Flash has been in this game a long time though and I have no doubt their verteran status will trump HTML5 for the next few years.

Graphics are a different story. With HTML5, the web will support vector graphics directly. This doesn’t really conflict with Flash however since embedding static non-interactive vector images, with Flash, doesn’t make much sense. The benefit lies mostly on the side of developers that will be able to scale images without making/saving multiple copies of an image or scale a logo with a liquid layout. The benefit on the user side lies with reduced loading times.

Verdict: Put simply, Flash will win. HTML5 through the canvas API has the potential for animation engines like the popular GreenSock suite. The performance thus far has been lacking though and unless Adobe themselves come up with an HTML5 compiling animation environment (which they might), developers will be sticking with Flash. Web vector graphics on the other hand are filling a need that Flash never filled anyways. Apples and oranges.

Connectivity

This is a much more convoluted battle ground. Through Java, browsers have plenty of live peer connection abilities. Flash has fought back with a number of connection services. Firstly, there’s AMFPHP. Not made by Adobe but still very powerful; if PHP can do it, so can Flash. There’s the barrier to entry with interface setup and complications around dealing with that interface, but the capability is there. Plenty of todays Flash applications connect with databases and display PHP-retrieved data. Then there’s RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol). This is what ChatRoulette uses for it’s awkward magic. RTMP enables a Flash player to stream a file (such as a .flv Flash video) from a Flash Server. Another punch came with the Adobe Labs release of the “Stratus” service.

Adobe Stratus

Stratus 1.0 (which I wrote about here), released in 2008, offered an exciting new way to connect Flash instances. When 2 Flash instances can connect directly to each other, this removes all server responsibility except the initial connection. The implications for chat and gaming were (and are) exciting. Then came Stratus 2.0, seen in the right panel above. Very exciting. Imagine the performance increase in gaming, conferencing and video streaming when you can receive information from your neighbors instead of a server half-way around the world. The only people more excited than Flash media users would be Flash media suppliers. The performance increase and server load decrease on something like YouTube would be phenomenal.

Verdict: This is the area in which Adobe has been advancing in leaps and bounds. Peer-to-peer connections are beyond the responsibility of the HTML5 specifications (or HTML6 for that matter). I don’t see HTML ever advancing to duplicate Adobe Stratus 2.0 functions. Flash wins this one in a big way.

3D

Let’s get something strait. This is not HTML5. It’s a Google Code project call O3D. In their own words – “Originally built as a browser plug-in, this new implementation of O3D is a JavaScript library implemented on top of WebGL”. While it’s not native HTML5, it makes use of HTML5, and it renders much more complex 3D environments, much better than Flash. 3D in Flash is sort of a hack – Adobe never intended for it to be a 3D engine. Papervision blazed the 3D Flash path and has since made a couple impressive advances. Away3D, Sandy 3D and Sophie 3D are other Flash 3D engines. With the release of Flash Player 10, Adobe recognized the 3D applications of Flash and made it much easier to render with it’s native 3D transformations. While it only allows 3D transformations of completely flat objects, this takes the calculation burden off of the imported library and dramatically improved performance. You can see what Papervision is capable of at papervisionshowcase.com (not currently working, but I assume it will be back soon).

Verdict: So far it’s a toss up which only time can settle. Even with Adobe offering performance enhancements and the dedication of the Papervision team, 3D in Flash is an exercise in how far you can push a hack. O3D is very young, but being a 3D-from-the-start development, it has a more solid foundation. It’s hard to say what will be developers’ mainstream choice. Sites that use 3D Flash, usually use to it to immerse a user in a product-centric environment. Flash’s animation abilities have proved much more immersive than any O3D (or Java based) implementation I’ve ever seen. I see that trend continuing for the next little while.

Games

Flash is without doubt the undisputed internet gaming king. Flash wins. By a lot. That was until my world was shaken… with this.

Quake II. In a browser. Don’t let the April 1st post date fool you – that’s Quake II running as well as it ever could. In a browser. This changes everything.

Verdict: Flash has an army of game developers behind it and a world of libraries such as Flixel. Developers are fickle and curious creatures though. I can see browser gaming exploding into 3D in the coming years and it will play out like the release of a new console. There will be communities and advocates for “retro” flash games, but the focus of internet gaming could entirely become HTML5 based Java ports like the one above. It’s a movement I would whole heartedly support.

In Conclusion…

The W3C aren’t bent on replacing Flash and it’s not what they’ve aimed for; Steve Jobs is responsible for any notion otherwise. HTML5 will change the role of Flash, but it is far from ever replacing it. I’d go as far to say that the role change would be minor – mainly simple video embeds and image rotators. The possibilities of Java and WebGL are very exciting and may largely replace Flash extensions such as Papervision, but not completely.

The Future of Flash Part I – The Current State of Affairs

Josh — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:29:31 +0000

Apple VS Adobe

Adobe and Apple have recently been making rather public fisticuffs (love that word). Adobe has been slightly quieter, letting their fans speak for them, while on Apple’s end, Steve himself has blogged on the matter. The whole affair has been splattered far and wide on the web, but above the opinions and battles defending such opinions, 1 question remains.

What is the future of Flash?

Flash has come a long way since it’s inception with Macromedia and it wasn’t an easy start. If you’ve been crawling the web for 8 years or so, then you remember how poor it’s integration was. Tricks and hackery was used to force cross-browser compatibility, it was very resource heavy and it didn’t play well with web standards. Yet, the mark had been made. Rich web media was born. It wasn’t long before a more or less standard embed technique was publicized and standards such as the clickTag emerged. Flash’s abilities in interactivity, smooth animations, sound and video playback as well as keyboard control were undeniably cool. Then came the jaw droppers. Site’s that used Flash in ways people couldn’t have seen coming. The future was bright.

A few years later while game changers like YouTube we’re emerging, a fateful patent violation brought Macromedia and Adobe to the table. Adobe’s very successful line of design software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc) had a lovely patent for dock-able toolbars. Macromedia published Flash with a dock-able toolbar and a legal battle ensued. The result was a $3.4 billion buyout; well received by the Flash community since their much loved workspace had returned. While the Flash experience on the developer side had improved, the experience on the web side had not. Being a browser plug-in, Flash can not properly access computer resources. Java had it’s virtual machine, but Flash required something else.

As Apple’s client base rapidly expanded, Microsoft worked directly with Adobe to ensure Flash had the resources it required to function acceptably. Apple and Linux were kept in the dark while the Flash experience flourished on Windows. Another, more ambiguous player was in the arena however. Java coupled with web native XML (AJAX) was producing some very unexpected results. Fetching data without reloading the page was giving the web new application-like abilities. What’s more – it wasn’t a resource heavy proprietary plug-in, and it worked across all operating systems and browsers. Google Maps was and still is undeniably the best application of AJAX. While AJAX and Flash shine in their own ways, web interactivity now had competition.

The Apple vs Adobe battle came center-ring with the release of what is now one of the world’s most successful mobile devices – the iPhone. Multi-touch blew the mobile web-experience wide open. People couldn’t wait for power of the whole internet in their pocket. Then came the announcement of no Flash support for the iPhone browser. With so much of the web experience involving Flash, the iPhone’s superior web abilities suddenly had a watered down image. The built-in YouTube application alleviated much pressure but the lack of support wasn’t let down. As the pressure for Flash support was seemingly ignored by Apple, something grew inside of Steve Jobs. His very public iPhone leak and very public reaction probably haven’t helped, but regardless, a usually cool and professional Steve has been a very unprofessional and childish Steve.

Adobe hasn’t been taking it all sitting down however. In what’s clearly a much more adult reaction, here’s what Adobe thinks:

Moving Forward
This morning Apple posted some thoughts about Flash on their web site.
The primary issue at hand is that Apple is choosing to block Adobe’s
widely used runtimes as well as a variety of technologies from other
providers.
Clearly, a lot of people are passionate about both Apple and Adobe and
our technologies. We feel confident that were Apple and Adobe to work
together as we are with a number of other partners, we could provide a
terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

However, as we posted last week, given the legal terms Apple has
imposed on developers, we have already decided to shift our focus away
from Apple devices for both Flash Player and AIR. We are working to
bring Flash Player and AIR to all the other major participants in the
mobile ecosystem, including Google, RIM, Palm (soon to be HP),
Microsoft, Nokia and others.

We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android
smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a
general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number
and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which
we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.

Like a cliché bar fight each side has friends and it is not just Adobe and Apple in the ring. Far from it. Google has sided with Adobe and made a subtle blow with the announcement of Flash being built into the next release of their Chrome browser. Such a move could have Flash preform similarly to HTML5, which has been the source of much Apple ammunition (Appleunition?). Microsoft, Google, Palm (soon to be HP), RIM and others have also teamed with Adobe for Flash support on mobile devices in an effort to give consumers a reason to jump off the Apple train. The list of stabs and swings is much too long to chronicle.

Various players can spout their pro-open-standards and throw around the p-word (proprietary) as much as they like, but where does this leave us? By July, a serious mobile Flash experience will be available on Android. This will be dangerously close to Apple’s release of the next iPhone. That light at the end of the tunnel it seems, was just a lamp. We’re going to be here for a while…

From Adobe Labs: Stratus

Josh — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:51:40 +0000

Stratus is Adobe Labs’ answer to those wanting online Flash to Flash (P2P) communication without Flash Media Server. Flash Media server can be anywhere from $995 to $4500 USD depending on your requirements. For now, Stratus is free and all you need is to sign up for a developer key.

In Adobe’s own words:

Stratus is a hosted rendezvous service that aids in establishing communications between Flash Player clients or Adobe AIR endpoints using RTMFP. Flash Player endpoints must stay connected to the server during the entire time of communications. Unlike Flash Media Server, Stratus does not stream video or support media relay, shared objects, or scripting. Stratus is being made available as a beta service through Adobe Labs to allow our developer community to begin building applications using RTMFP.

Stratus introduces a Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) which has the potential to completely change the online Flash experience. Being able to pass even small amounts of info between separate users blows online browser gaming wide open. It’s also fast enough to handle video and audio chat. I hope to fit in a project making use of it this year and it will certainly be gaming related.

Insideria has a great beginner tutorial or if you like videos, FlashRealTime has you covered.