Discussion on:

How will HTML 5, Google, and the iPad play out in Apple vs. Flash?

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The User.

too many of the discussions go on about Apple vs Adobe, and winners and losers, whilst completely missing the point that it is in the user's best interest that an open standard prevails, and I think that Apple tends these days to promote that aspect better than most (unlike their very chequered and 'restrictive' past!)

Never thought of them in that way. Their entirely closed ecosystem for iPhone/iPad is most definately not open. Even the article reference in the post states:

Apple is a control freak that wants to lock in all aspects of any industry in which the company plays. Aside from some legitimate performance issues, Apple and CEO Steve Jobs don?t want to be beholding to another company, no matter what the long relationship history between them. Under HTML 5, Apple can push to do things its way, sell the technology (think QuickTime) to encode and run video on web sites, and extend its grasp on downloaded media sales.
(http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10006554/html-5-google-microsoft-apple-and-adobe-fight-to-rule-the-web/ )

I would never think of Apple as being open standard. In fact secretly they've always relished in the fact that they are closed standard. But on to the vote results. I'm shocked that most people think that Apple will win the web standards. Adobe has been around for years and has made a position for themselves in the graphic/web design industry. I just don't see Adobe folding to Apple. It's like Bing trying to compete with Google. Yeah Microsoft will put up a good fight and buy out rights for searches, but in the end google will always be the search engine of choice.

Open or closed, the user doesn't care. If the web sites he visits use Flash, he wants to be able see the video, period.

Users may see long-term benefits from open standards. But they benefit today from today's standards, de-facto though they may be.

Fights over such things between companies usually catch the user up in them, and ensure that user is the one loser, regardless of who ultimately wins.

Apple would have far more credibility in this if their push for open standards were genuine, and not just an effort to keep things like Flash games off the iPhone.. thus making more sales.

If Google wanted to kill Flash, they wouldn't attack Flash directly, they'd figure out how to get people to choose the open standard. Understand it first. Flash is popular because of the authoring tools.. content people can write programs, no software guy needed. Google would release a free app that's better than Adobe's Flash authoring tools, and yet standards based.

Apple wants to kill Flash, but they really don't want standards replacing all of Flash, either. An HTML 5 game, if possible, would be just as threatening as a Flash game to them. So they pretend it's all about viideo, and their customers get stuck with a second class view of the web as it actually is.

It *IS* best for the user.

People are lazy. They go for what's pretty, right now, with no regard for the consequence. Take HDMI for instance. When's the last time your cable manufacturer paid license charges for analog VGA or SPDIF cables? Now we're "locked in" to a proprietary technology, with all its associated baggage and fees, just because the consumer got to connect their electronics with a single cable. Keep that convenience in mind when you pay $99 for a 6-ft cable. We win. Yay for us.

Websites have taken for granted that users will have Flash installed for way too long. It breeds laziness, and as someone with a custom-compiled Gentoo 64-bit Linux environment, I can tell you, trying to get Flash to work just wasn't worth the trouble. Maybe even MOST sites degrade gracefully. Some just fell apart. There's no excuse for that.

Furthermore, on portable devices, the bulkiness and inefficiency of Adobe code would be a real liability to performance and battery life.

Apple actually has enough clout to pull this off. They managed to wrestle the music industry into letting them remove DRM from iTunes music downloads (you're welcome).

With a major consumer device out there, used frequently for web surfing, that will never support Flash... that gives webdevs something to think about. Maybe next time, they'll give their site design more thought than the consolation prize: "Click 'here' to download Flash".

If you still want to whine about how Apple has their own agenda behind this false altruism, hey you're probably absolutely right. But maybe so did Mozilla when they gave us Firefox and finally provided web users a real alternative to half-assed CSS and PNG support. Or Google, when they gave us Chrome and made JavaScript execution time a non-issue.

The other browsers (FINALLY) got their stuff together and followed suit. I hear IE9's JavaScript performance is supposed to be much better. Without someone saying "enough is enough", we'd still be using IE6. But that worked well enough, didn't it? After all, it had Active X and VBScript support!

Not that I found - yes they are there but I did not buy those ones.

Apple may want to kill Flash, but I suspect they have a bigger goal. By limiting what their browser can do, they push people into using apps. Apps (even free ones) create customer lock-in and Apple gets 30% of each sale.

I am probably very dated here but, isn't HTML, a mark up language, which only purpose is to format text?

What do you have to do, code animations in javascript now?

It did basic text layout. Then it included tables. Then it included images. It continues to evolve slowly.

I can't see how else it can animate...

I don't know if it's somehow merging vrml or what. For animation, I'd guess that the browser is making use of 3D hooks since it's rendering the downloaded html code. Now, if the browser using these hardware functions is safer than a third party plugin like Flash; we'll have to see how that shakes out.

Which means heavy processor usage. Things like flash are constantly looping and calculating frames, creating an image and having your graphics card display it.


Now, I can see scripted animation for vector graphics, but not raster graphics. At least nothing interactive. GIF images basically...

I see Google being the big one here. It is like Sony to the disc industry. Sony wanted to push blue ray and MS wanted to try to push DVD9. Guess who has fased out and now MS is switching their consoles to Blue Ray because you can not fight the powers to be. This is how Google is working the web and with their power on the market it gives them more pull I believe.

Is Galen right about Apple seriously wanting to kill Flash? You better believe it!
When Apple previewed its new iPhone 4.0 OS tyoday, they slipped in a change to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement for 4.0. You can read about it here:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler

Yeah, Apple's stacking the bricks around their walled garden awful high ...

I used the term "lock-in" in my earlier post on this topic, and it's clear that's what they're going for. Apple doesn't want to make it easy for developers - or customers - to have an alternative to switch to.

In this article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=7958 Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out that decisions like this are designed to hinder cross-platform development. This keeps both developers and customers faithful to the Apple ecosystem.

It was just a couple of months ago that a developer of a cross-platform app submitted an update, and Apple made them remove references to Android compatibility from the Apple marketplace blurb.

Doug

My wife is a teacher and can't stand sitting at a desk to do some of her necessary paperwork like filling out the grades and comments on students using the school district's online system. I've thought about getting her a laptop so she's not tied to a desk.

She likes Macs (uses them at school), but they're twice as expensive as Windows machines and I don't want to learn how to support them. So since we already had a Windows desktop, she's just been using that.

But when the iPad was announced and I started reading about it, I thought this was the answer: web browsing on a comfortable, easy-to-use "tablet" and it's not too expensive, either!

But when I found out about its refusal to support Flash or Java, it killed the deal. Why does Apple continue to be so snobbish? They're shooting themselves in the foot. It doesn't matter how beautiful or easy-to-use the system is if it doesn't meet people's needs. There are a lot web sites that use Java. What is Apple thinking?