[pangram]

Out of interest, is there anything you can share about the particulars of your application? We did the same Flash vs. HTML5 analysis in the context of Facebook games, but in our experiments it looked like Flash still won handily in terms of performance.

[vessenes]

It was a business intelligence app; the front end rendered graphs and charts based on data over Zend.

We staged out of that architecture by implementing a REST endpoint on top of Zend, and moved our graphing over to the (now-superceded) protovis library.

Our engineers weren't used to worrying about data transfer, so we had to do a little bit of engineering work on the JSON side once we switched out, but the graphs, charts and rendering are VASTLY faster.

That said, it could well be the Flex runtime that added all the badness; flash games definitely render faster than our app did.

[wslh]

Not just that, even the Google Chrome support for SVG is terrible, it crashes very quickly if you draw a lot of nodes. I also found very simple bugs like moving a SVG objects leaves a trail behind. A good vectorial support is needed to replace flash.

[untog]

It's a constant disappointment to me that Canvas is favoured over SVG. Just drawing simple shapes and moving them is so much more complicated with Canvas.