Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past, oh I don’t know, few months, you would already know that there’s quite a battle going on between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash on iPhone and iPad. Few weeks ago, Apple posted a letter on their site called “Thoughts on Flash” by Steve Jobs, worth a read, if you haven’t already.
A few days after the Steve Jobs letter, Microsoft went public to announce that they’ll integrate H.264 in Internet Explorer 9 with HTML5, and not Flash. Why? Well, basically H.264 is not proprietary like Flash and H.264 is unlikely to be involved in patent cases, unlike VP3 or VP8.
Of course Microsoft also points out that Flash is still possible, by installing a plugin.
TechCrunch did a piece on this whole H.264 / Flash thing, and asked Encoding.com which has encoded 5 million videos over the past year, for a variety of websites. In the past year, H.264 went from 31% of all videos to 66% and is now the largest format by far. Flash (VP6 and FLV combined) represents only 26% of all videos, down from a combined total of 69%.
All YouTube videos are available in H.264, meaning around 40% of all videos on the web is available in a non-Flash format.
Could this be the end of Flash as we know it then… The thing is though with FireFox and Chrome becoming more popular the IE will IE9 actually be worth anyone using it.
.-= Karen´s last blog ..You Wanted Twitter Tips, You Got Them! – Part One =-.
I don’t know how the future will look for IE9, but I’m sure IE9 will be better thane IE8, and more secure too. If that happens, then I wouldn’t mind people using IE9. Right now, I usually recommend another browser than IE8. But, IE8 is better than Ie7, after all.
Adobe even said that they will support HTML5 and H.264 in there flash. Flash still needs to die…its like the IE6 we can’t escape.
I think Flash will naturally be replaced with something else/better, once enough major sites begin to move over to HTML5 and/or H.264 or another format.
As many problems as I have with Flash, I don’t see it disappearing over night. I do, however, think we are on a road to see it slowly disappear over time. I’m hoping that one day, I won’t have to explain to clients why a Flash Intro or a full Flash website is a bad idea, haha.
.-= Ryan Cowles´s last blog ..Free Texture Pack by Metacom Creative – Cardboard, Notebook, Paper, Envelope, etc =-.
I agree 100% with that statement, well said 🙂