[fedorabbit]

My experience of HTML5 right now doesn't really have significant performance improvement compare to Flash, even on Mac OS X. I think it still has a long way to go. But it is nice to see someone's exploring the frontier! The blurring effect doesn't seem right though...

[phoboslab]

That really depends on what you want to do. The drawing performance for the canvas element has been dramatically improved in the last few months - for desktop browsers at least.

And then of course, there's WebGL; even if you just use it for 2D stuff (shameless plug: http://www.phoboslab.org/xtype/ ) it's way faster than Flash. I have no doubt that in a few month the the 2D canvas context will have the exact same performance (if not better) as WebGL for 2D stuff.

[cryptoz]

My experience of HTML5 is that it blows Flash out of the water. Flash on Linux is (still) an absolute disaster while HTML5 is making progress every day and has long surpassed Flash in usefulness for most tasks.

[whatever_dude]

My experience is that your anecdotal experience is flawed and that Flash has a better workflow AND performance AND battery conservation on both desktops and mobile platforms (where it's allowed).

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/html5-still-lagging-behind-flas...

http://iq12.com/blog/as3-benchmark/

http://workflowed.blogspot.com/2011/02/flash-player-101-for-...

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/testing-videos-on-...

http://www.androidtabletnows.com/android-devices-news/2011/n...

http://themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/

http://vimeo.com/10553088

http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2010/09/17/flash-outperforms-htm...

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark2/

But hey, let's complain about it because "Adobe is evil" or whatever! (and note: I'm an Ubuntu x64 user).

[pcwalton]

http://iq12.com/blog/as3-benchmark/

Is this what you wanted to post? This shows that the browsers' JS engines have been outrunning ActionScript for years now...

[whatever_dude]

This is exactly what I wanted to post. My links cover all the spectrum of tests employed, not just tests that are favorable to Flash. GuiMark3, for example, found that HTML5 rendering of video in high resolutions on mobile devices tend to be faster than Flash video too, depending on version. I'm a defender of pragmatism, not of Flash, and it drives me mad to see people saying things that are just not true, like the previous poster.

My point is that if one analyzes the data, one will find that Flash tend to win over HTML5/canvas performance more often than not. The canvas and visual performance tests are very telling.

As a side note, there's definitely a gap in code execution - that's the link you posted - but it's just one of the factors, as Adobe is well aware of that and is addressing it on the next release. The AS3 VM was much faster than JS when introduced, then they spent a lot of time not doing any optimization at all. From what I've seen from their presentations, they're ready to take that back. Time will tell.

[tensor]

I'm very skeptical. Claims like this never seem to be born out in actual benchmarks.

http://pacoup.com/2011/02/03/flash-vs-html5-performance/

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/

The advantage of flash right now is that you can be reasonably sure that if a user has it installed, they will get a minimum set of features and performance. With HTML5, your complex app may run fine, or may not run at all, depending on the users implementation.

I've no doubt the performance gap between flash and html5 will continue to narrow. However, I'm less sure that there is anything in the design of html5 that would allow for implementations that are significantly faster than flash allows for. Perhaps someone with deeper technical knowledge of the two could comment.

HTML5 does have the advantage that it's an open platform, of course. Thus you are much more likely to actually see competing implementations of the standard.

[fedorabbit]

I agree. Especially Apple will try to compete heavily on HTML5 standards, since Flash is out of question for iPad, and iPhone. Since their devices only support Safari, HTML5 can certainly be optimized for it. Same thing for the rest of the world... kinda make it more complicated than Flash platform.

[chc]

Not so. I see people all the time who just get a "This content requires a newer version of Flash."

[tensor]

That can happen. Or users may not even have it installed. But contrast with the case of a user with a browser that doesn't support some features of HTML5. How do you detect which features work for them, and which don't? How can the user fix the problem?

The only way to fix it is to install a new browser, or perhaps a new version of the current browser. Installing a plugin is often easier. Rather than deal with this, developers currently just develop for and test on a few main browsers. Anyone not on these are left with no other options but to switch browsers.

Suffice to say, HTML5 doesn't really improve the situation all that much. It simply trades the closed model that Adobe uses with Flash for an open model that has been used for HTML. In either case, the only way to be really compatible is to use older well established features.

Open platforms are good, and thus HTML5 is a good development. But it's not the silver bullet that many make it out to be.

[leviathant]

Every time I see a post about how HTML5+JS+CSS3 is so much better than Flash, they clearly are ignoring major subsets of what Flash does. First and foremost, browser-native audio processing is nearly a decade behind Flash. Not just in theory - toward the end of last year through February of this year, I set about emulating a fairly simple drum machine in HTML + Javascript, and while the fundamentals are basically there, the audio playback is atrocious on every single browser - try it out at http://bitrotten.com/dr110/

It was a fun experience, and maybe later this year I'll grab a trial of Flash and port it there, just to A/B them. But if you think HTML5 is going to replace Flash, you have a limited knowledge of what Flash can do.