[2muchcoffeeman]

The company had already said that HTML5 was the way forward on phones and tablets -- now we know just how quickly it's backing up that claim.

Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now? I use iOS devices and completely removed Flash from my Mac months ago. There is a Safari plugin to force the use of the H264 stream from youtube.

Haven't missed Flash at all.

[k-mcgrady]

I would like to do this but I've found that YouTube's HTML5 player is terrible. Buffering is always erratic and just loading the page causes my browser to freeze for 5-10 seconds (it usually starts working again once the video is loaded into the player). As much as I want to see Flash go away it's still the best choice for web video on a desktop machine (at least on YouTube).

[Synaesthesia]

Yes, the Youtube HTML5 player is bad, but the Safari plug in mentioned (I think it only works on Mac) is great. It's called youtube5 btw

[2muchcoffeeman]

Yes, unfortunately it is for OS X Safari only http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/.

But it does show you can get on just fine without Flash. There is no equivalent Chrome extension. I don't know why. A completely Flash free experience is the reason I use Safari.

[ars]

> Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now?

Flash is not used just for video, there are a huge number of games that use it and HTML5 is not ready for prime time there. (Not enough browser support, and coding a game in HTML5 is much harder.)

[novalis]

There are several reasons, audio in html5 is not ready at this point. Also, 3d in javascript is miles away from being a reality (actual 3d, like in x,y,z referenced points, not the anaglyphic 3d kind) and Mr. Doob with his fantastic three.js is still a distance away from what can be done in flash/actionscript now.

Those are some of the reason actionscript, air and flex are going to be around for a long time, even on mobile. If you "miss it" or you don't miss it, that is your own constructed opinion and it won't make flash go away sooner/later or ever for that matter

Flash simply outputs to ios executables now and you don't have a clue you are running it anymore, so, maybe that is part of why you don't miss it.

You don't seem to miss the know how of why it is necessary still, so that kind of loops to the point you don't know why we can't "just move onto HTML5 now?" Weird huh. How did that come about.

Picking camps is not the same as having a valid opinion based on objective reason, in your case it makes you stand out like a meme based "are we there yet" user. Cheerleading is awesome. But it really doesn't make the players score on its own.

Last reason why it won't "go away", flash developers get paid to make chart topping games that run on ios, while apple takes a store app cut from it.

[noduerme]

Because gaming. Pretty much any graphics operation you can do in Flash can be done with Javascript and Canvas. But it requires writing several times as much code, runs about 20% of the speed and consumes most of the CPU to do simple tasks.

For example, lets say you want to create a little green radar HUD map for where enemies are on a battlefield in front of you. In AS3 you can make each enemy dot be a sprite, and move them individually when necessary. You can mask them when they reach the edge of the HUD, fade them out when they disappear. When you turn left or right, they all turn together. Because of how Flash's graphics engine works, only the graphical areas that are changed in each frame are actually redrawn; this is all handled at a very low level and the speed is close to native; it can also be coded to take advantage of a GPU.

To accomplish the same thing in Javascript and Canvas, you have to write an engine that tracks where each of those things is in global space. To draw little rectangles at different rotations within the same canvas, you actually have to rotate the canvas, draw the rectangle, then unrotate the canvas. Once you've got this engine written, you still have to redraw the entire canvas with your engine deciding how to draw each pixel, square or circle, one by one, with every single frame. To get around that, you write another engine that determines which areas are changing and only redraws those. But then you have to decide what to do when overlapping objects are in front of or behind that area, so now you've written a scene graph, z-order and a traverser, and possibly parent-child relationships, from scratch. Fine, but you realize that the traverser, running as it is in untyped javascript without the benefit of typed iterators like vectors, can't handle more than a dozen objects before it's hogging up even more of the CPU than if you just redrew the whole stupid canvas every single frame.

So, all this behavior is necessary for any game. Good coders are struggling to make these things playable in HTML5 to keep the mobile market happy, but to do that you have to cut a lot of corners. The game quality's obviously lower, and the games are slower than they would be in AS3. It's just unavoidable. People who don't know how computers work then complain that Flash is so slow, etc. because of the perception of sloppily coded banners and stuff. But when the same exact things are written in Javascript and Canvas they are much, much slower.

[molmalo]

We still need a nice editor to let designers handle HTML5 nicely. Adobe is making progress, but until them or somebody else releases a fully functional product ready for designers, well... it won't be that easy....

Edit: why would someone downvote this? Do you really believe that designers (not developers) should handle canvas and Javascript directly instead of using an editor?

[Skrekkpus]

developing anything equivalent to a half ambitious flash app in html5 is just really hard. html5 has a long way to go.