Ecstortive

Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content

Apple CEO - Steve Jobs

When you’re displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses.

Adobe CTO - Kevin Lynch

After the dog fight there is still an ongoing argument for the future of Flash. I may sound little biased during the article, but standing in designer’s shoes and being a programmer as well gives me a different perspective. First of all lets make it clear, Apple was the one with its open letter to start Flash War for real. I’ve got to comment on the statements Apple made, recently they announced about dropping Java support but suddenly OpenJDK was announced, which really confused me for second time (Flash first time). I am great fan of Apple especially Steve Jobs, he inspires me at times. But looking at pattern of events from past, I think Apple is not calculating anymore (first they dropped Flash but then allowed it in App Store, then Java and now the OpenJDK story), and I think its enough for us (me at-least) to convince us that we have to make our own choice in technology. Since we ultimately are the technology consumers not Apple! It’s almost the same mistake that we did when IE6 became our favorite browser.

Now for second part, is Flash really the cursed technology? I recently came across the site HTML5 vs Flash, and honestly speaking I found the Flash animations smoother than HTML5 ones (Try it yourself). I did notice the processor usage while I was having the fun and I think I can sum it up in a single statement from Apple in 20XX “Disable JavaScript in your browser; it will increase your battery life to 1 Month”. HTML5 was almost all the time taking more CPU usage than Flash. Here is one of the images from one of the experiments I tried:

I tried chrome 8 too as well it varied from 28% to 35%. I have to agree with Adobe CTO if its processor intensive in Flash it’s (most probably more) processor intensive in HTML5. I am not giving any clear decisions about which technology is ultimate winner; I am only saying HTML5 is immature (I said it again) and there is no way it’s justified for me to drop out Flash (In fact its the only graceful degrading to supply rich media experience).

I only want the designers and programmers to realize the responsibility; we are just in phase of recovery from IE 6 (yes I consider it as viral infection). Over here we have to setup a framework for next decade. So be smart, don’t be foolish!