In the public feud between Apple and Adobe regarding Flash, HTML5 and open standards, both companies are working hard to shape public opinion. As always when the loudest voices aren’t very honest, it becomes difficult to tell facts from marketing. In fine Stopp tradition, we’ll try to put market buzz in some real-world perspective.

There has been plenty of talk about the role, or even raison d’être, of flash in the dawning HTML5 era. Much of it stems from frustration with the historically flagrant misuse of Flash rather than from an accurate assessments of its strengths and weaknesses. This skews the debate towards a wishful gazing at the technological horizon rather than a sober analysis of how these technologies should be used here and now.

No other web browser plug-in comes even close to Flash’s astonishing 98% market penetration. One reason it has become so dominant is that it has continously provided developers access to new technologies many years before the browsers themselves. Among these, video is the probably the most important. The recent murmurs of HTML5’s threat to Flash stems largely from its ability to embed video, but to go from there to the conclusion that the reign of Flash is over, is a bit far-fetched for a lot of reasons.

First of all, old browsers die slowly. At least 60% of web users today use Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8, neither of which have any support for <video>. This means that for the foreseeable future we can’t rely on HTML5 video if we want to reach a wide audience. Second, not all video is equal. Unfortunately that means patience alone will not bring HTML5 video glory to all of mankind.

The h.264 codec has gained traction on everything from Flash to Blu-Ray and iPods thanks to its flexibility, efficiency and the fact that it’s an open standard. It is not free, however — h.264 is encumbered with a series of patents, some of which are, interestingly, owned by Apple by way of MPEG-LA. Because of this situation, open source browser Firefox does not include h.264 support for the HTML5 <video> tag, as that would require a license. Their ideological stance that relying on technologies with software patents is bad for the open web is also shared by Opera.

So while h.264 is the supported video codec in HTML5 with Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer 9, Firefox and Opera use open source codec Theora. Google recently tried to change this stalemate by releasing the VP8 codec as open source, calling it WebM. They got an impressive array of companies to support it, Adobe being one of them. But large as that list may be, it solves nothing unless all major browser vendors are on board, and by the look of things Apple are not. The reason may be that WebM appears to borrow patented code from h.264 (more here), which means it may not be so free after all (rebuttals here and here). Internet Explorer 9 user will have to install a plugin for WebM support, further raising the theshold for its adoption in the video market.

So in the case of video on the web, Flash is undeniably the victor. It can play both h.264 and WebM (soon, at least), and is installed on 98% of all browsers. It also allows much greater control over video playback and things like DRM which is still not feasible with HTML5 video. This pattern is repeated for many of the things that HTML5 brings, which is brilliantly visualized at html5readiness.com (click image to visit site in new window):

It is not all bleak and grim, however. Many of the features of HTML5 have already been created through things like jQuery (AJAX, cross-browser compatible animations, and much more), Cufon for using any font without resorting tom images or Flash, and many more. These types of user-driven toolkits are the real alternatives to Flash when it comes to animation, design and dynamic content. There’s also the mobile browser market, where Flash has yet to make much of an impact, and it’s prototype demos for Android shows Adobe still have some work to do.

There is no conclusion

The web is a living medium, evolving at an amazing pace. The technology winning today might be irrelevant tomorrow, and vice versa. Our loyalty is with the web as a medium and not with any particular technology. Constantly testing and evaluating emerging technologies is crucial to ensure that we provide the nicest, smartest and most efficient solutions to our clients.

For more information, contact Stopp web.

/Ola Björling

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 10:17 am and is filed under Technology, Web Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.