2010: The Year Flash Dies.
Friday, January 22, 2010 at 10:53AM 
Adobe Flash, you've had a good run. You've humored us through the years with various updates. You've made our workday a little slower with buffering, and CPU overload. And in all seriousness, without you, we may have never known the words "embed code" on websites. Alas, like all good things, this too must end.
When Apple released the iPhone, and it didn't support flash, we scoffed. How dare they turn their back on the predominant 3rd party content delivery platform! This will be the Achille's heel of the iPhone! Instead, in the latest in a string of events showing just how mighty Apple has become, in announcing their support for html 5, the rest of the industry slowly started to follow suit.
And now this week, the site with the largest amount of flash-encoded content in the world, YouTube, has started making its videos available without Flash. Vimeo has announced they will follow suit, and thus begins a sudden, dizzying spiral. It will still take a few months for the death certificate to be signed. After all, we have to still rely on Flash for our live video stream, but that will all change soon enough. What YouTube(google) and Apple do, the rest of the industry surely follows.
Let's meet back at this post in a year, and see if our dear, CPU-hogging friend is still with us...
Reader Comments (13)
Amen, Amen, Amen
I almost gave up swearing at Flash and it's pervasive bandwidth hogging clunkiness - it's been so long. Hopefully html 5 code will be fully accepted once MS get over it and do full implementation tho' I'm not holding my breath yet since Adobe will fight all the way.
I only wish - however Internet Explorer will keep Flash around far longer than necessary. IE 8 has yet to fully adopt the 10+ year old CSS 2.1 spec much less think about CSS 3 and HTML 5.
It would so great if Flash would die. Google/Youtube might actually make it happen.
I still think Flash on the Iphone and tablet will be demoed next week.
Don't count on it Jamie.
Actually, it will be great when pseudonymous writing dies off... it usually gets both facts and implications wrong.
jd/adobe
This is pretty unlikely, especially considering HTML5's video/audio performance is just awful. This is in addition to the fact that the full HTML5 spec is implemented inconsistently across browsers, leading to fragmentation and inconsistent user experiences across the board.
It's going to take much more than a year to legitimately claim the "death" of Flash. This kind of reminds me of how people claimed the "death" of PC gaming at the onset of a console generation that caught up with PC's performance (for about a month).
I love when people bash about some technology when they have no idea
what they're talking about.
You're wrong on so many level it's ridiculous.
Ok let's go.
The flash player was already widely used well before youtube ever existed.
Wether youtube or site alike use or not flash to display video, it's not gonna kill flash.
Because flash is more than just a plugin to stream video,
flash is a powerful platform which among many things can also stream video.
HTML 5, web standards etc.. ok it's all nice and shiny but
the video tag would not exists if flash did not enable the technology
and the idea in the first place.
Same, youtube and all other similar web site like vimeo etc. would not
exists if flash did not pre-exists, flash enabled something and now
about 5 years later the browsers catch up.
And because you like some much to compare orange and apple,
let's take an Apple example:
the youtube app on the iphone since june 2007 does not use flash.
hum almost 3 years, and it did not kill flash already ?
Now let's talk about the percentage of people who do have flash installed
and can view video easily in their browser without having to fudge their
setting to try and find the correct codec to watch a particular video
compared to the percentage of people who have a very recent browser installed
that can allow them to watch a video via HTML 5
that would be a 98% to 2% relationship
so about that 1 year deadline for flash to die, you're way way off.
Let's meet back in a year, and see. :)
Flash as a video wrapper may die, and that is good. It never should have been a video wrapper. It was just an ubiquitous plug in in a web world being confused by too many codecs. Flash merely was in the right spot when high bandwidth became common enough for people to want to see video (and the flash animation, like, umm, "frog in the blender?" leading up to this helped this transition to it becoming a standard.
it can hang around for vector graphic games and some other activity if it wants to. What really killed flash was Ads. When you can't see a web pages content for the five hog ads trying to load, people move on.
hahah, can't wait to animated HTML5 banners, which will totally make browsers become CPU hogs ... and then you will see that Flash is faster.
you are out guys - HTML5 is nice, but it's where Flash was 7 years ago. Also you have no IDE and it's hard and expensive to develop with stupid JavaScript.
Flash would be perfectly fine tool, if it weren't for web site designers who OVERUSE it.
Flash, as it is mis-used today, detracts from many people's web surfing experience.
Me? I installed ClickToFlash on my Mac. It gives me the choice to selectively load Flash frames (is that the correct term?) that I actually WANT to see, rather than wait for Flash to load a bunch of bandwidth hogging visual garbage.
http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
I think we don't even have to wait one year
see story like this one
look at the informative comments
nuff said