Comments on: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash!

By: mir.aculo.us with Thomas Fuchs » Blog Archive » I can’t believe it’s not Flash talk video

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:06:13 +0000

[...] my earlier article with the slides (view online and/or [...]

By: Markus

Markus — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:06:30 +0000

Hi Thomas,

as always awesome slide with great explanations. The slides are worth reading even without all the videos inside

Thanks!

By: Caffeine Driven Development » Blog Archive » L33t Links #85

Caffeine Driven Development » Blog Archive » L33t Links #85 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:18:22 +0000

[...] I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash!, from the author of script.aculo.us [...]

By: Dezmond Finney

Dezmond Finney — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:27:47 +0000

@Jake What you say may have been true in the past but with HTML5 and the canvas tag it is no longer the case. Check out RhapaelJS for an example of a JS library that helps build amazing “document-less” applications. (ie no back button required) Hell, Thomas Fuchs scripty2 is amazing. If you don’t need document structure don’t use it. And while it has been a struggle to get major vendor support for standards (*glares at MS*) this is no longer an issue because of the spread of FireFox and WebKit Browsers and libraries like jQuery. In the past people did go to Flash to build “RIAs” but do so less and less. Almost all of Google’s Apps are JS for example.

The real reason Flash will die is because it doesn’t provide significant performance over JS. (and in the cases where it does they are usually edge cases) In many cases and on many platforms there is a performance loss (looking at anything with a battery). Even if I am wrong about performance (listening to my laptop’s fan crank up when I hit youtube assures me that I’m right ^_^) there is another problem – a bigger one in my mind. Flash and it’s dev tools are closed and proprietary. Being closed makes it almost antithetical to the philosophy of the web. Look at MSIE. It crushed Netscape to become top dog. I even had it on my mac. But now it is slowly losing market share on the desktop and has already lost it in mobile.

Just put it this way, there where/are some cool ActiveX Plugins but when was the last time you saw someone use them widely? Flash is going the way of ActiveX.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:03:10 +0000

Ajax is bubble gum and bailing wire shoehorned into a paradigm that is STILL predicated on a document retrieval protocol. Flash broke that precarious mold by providing something that the native browser environment still has yet to achieve: a standard platform that is basically the same wherever you find it.
Browser technology took computing progress into the dark ages, and it has taken decades to get to a state where it is actually feasible to build interactive applications, despite how frustrating and annoying it is to have to open a web browser to do any work.

If the browser environment can ever get past this archaic page-based concept (eliminate the stupid BACK button) and provide an actual APPLICATION development platform that is consistent across all browsers (GOOD LUCK!), then it might be worth raving about.

No amount of bubble gum and bailing wire, tunneled through a mere XHR API, will ever compete with Flash.

By: Thomas Fuchs

Thomas Fuchs — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:31:48 +0000

@Miller I disagree. There’s a fundamental difference between Flash and JavaScript.

One is a proprietary plugin, that doesn’t work that great (for whatever reasons, which just don’t matter to end users), the other technology is an integral part of web browsers.

JavaScript is not a mere add-on to beautify interaction, it is the (to paraphrase Bruce Sterling) duct tape of the internet. It makes things work. Without it, there would be no web applications, just static sites.

JavaScript is what separates the web from mere reproduction of printed content and elevates it to its own from of expression.

Whether you like it or not, Flash is a technology that had its uses but is very quickly become obsolete. There was a time before Flash (Flash video support only appeared in 2002!), and there will be one after. JavaScript (and the DOM API), on the other hand is like HTML & CSS, an integral part that’s here to stay.

By: Miller Medeiros

Miller Medeiros — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:14:09 +0000

The presentation should have been really interesting – specially by pointing that the reflow and rendering are what makes things slow (that you can confirm easily using Chrome Speed Tracer) – but one thing that really pisses me of is telling that JS nowadays can be as fast as Flash and that it will kill it, that’s not true at all.

HTML5 video only runs better than a fullscreen Flash video on a Mac, and that only happens because Apple don’t give access to hardware acceleration on videos that aren’t Quicktime.

If you want some good references about the topic:

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/01/sympathy_for_the_devil.html

http://richardleggett.co.uk/blog/index.php/2010/02/01/the-world-is-moving-to-html5

http://createdigitalmotion.com/2010/02/html5-and-a-brave-flash-free-open-world-uh-not-so-fast/

Flash and HTML will coexist for a long time and that is good for everyone… each technology has it’s own purpose.

Don’t use Flash or JavaScript without a reason!

By: Thomas Fuchs

Thomas Fuchs — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:39:39 +0000

@Dan It’s ironic, I know!

By: Dan Jones

Dan Jones — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:55:34 +0000

This is very interesting and informative, but I have a really hard time taking it seriously when the tool you use to embed the presentation on this page requires Flash.