Comments on: The end of flash on the web

By: Shawn Solomon

Shawn Solomon — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:02:00 +0000

Speaking as a web dev… It’s not that we won’t use it at all anymore, but will be vastly less inclined to as CSS3′s animations and HTML5 audio/video tags become more prevalent. Though without HTML 5 being fully adopted and standardized in its entirety across all major modern browsers yet, Flash has roughly 2 more years left in it. (Until the W3 recommended status for HTML5 & CSS3 in 2014.)

By: Ian Moffitt

Ian Moffitt — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:50:00 +0000

“I will not use flash to make slightly interactive elements on my clients websites” != “Flash is dead”. There are other reasons for using flash than making your navigation wobble when you mouse over it. Look at Newgrounds and Kongregate. Budding flash game communities. If you suddenly said “Okay, move along, all of you have to make this shit in Canvas now”, you’d kill a lot of creativity, especially with the ease of creation that Flash offers with the Creative Suite.

Feel free to ignore Flash all you want, and write all the blog posts you want about how you are ignoring Flash for your own work, but do not make blanket statements from your soapbox saying a platform that is easy to enter is dead and nobody should use it or they suck.

By: Ian Moffitt

Ian Moffitt — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:50:00 +0000

Also, what you SHOULD be advocating is full support of all the video codecs on every browser so people don’t HAVE to use Flash. Like James says below, the video tag doesn’t have anything on Flash right now. Canvas? Please. The spec isn’t even done and there isn’t anything that exists right now that lets you quickly churn out something in Canvas, preventing novices from creating things in it. You basically have to know Math and JavaScript. I think it’s rather pompous to go around declaring things are dead when the tools you want everyone to use aren’t even fully specified yet.

By: James Howard

James Howard — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:36:00 +0000

Until provides the content protection that content producers are happy with, there will always be a need for Flash or Silverlight on the web. I work for a company that do a lot of media & entertainment work and these clients would never dream of allowing us to serve their premium content with no DRM.

By: Joshua Granick

Joshua Granick — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:55:00 +0000

There are at least two different kinds of experiences — those which need to be visible to a large audience (wide) and those which need to perform well (deep)

When most of us browsed the internet using a desktop or laptop computer, Flash was an excellent choice for providing wide (and deep!) experiences for 99% of users. I think it is clear that is changing.

I’m using NME (haxenme.org) to build my games for iOS, Android, webOS, Windows, Mac, Linux and Flash or HTML5 in the browser. I guess it doesn’t always have to be an either/or.

By: Dave Campos

Dave Campos — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:49:00 +0000

As I read this I was just creating an intro for an elearning program in Flash, hahah. In large part flash will soon fade but I sure hope there will be tools for HTML5 that can help me create the interactive elearning I currently make as quickly as I can with Flash.