Steve Jobs and Apple are not the only ones Adobe have to worry about when it comes to the future of Flash. There are veritable legions of everyday web developers willing, and eager to ditch Flash.

There is now, less and less reason to use Flash on a website as the new HTML5  standard is starting to be implemented by the browser vendors. How does HTML 5 sound the death knell for Flash? Let’s list some of the major features of both side by side.

So as you can see all bases are covered. But, HTML5’s ascendancy is all dependent upon browser implementation. Again we’re heading into an era of competing browser technologies as some browser vendors choose differing implementations. HTML5 video is a good example. FireFox only supports, the Ogg Theora format, while the others are going with H.264. This hardly makes developers’ or content providers’ lives easy.

But somewhere along the way, everything will harmonize. And at that point, Flash will be history. It’s inevitable. Why would you mess about with a third party plugin when the browser will natively do all the things you require?

Multiple file uploads were for a long time a reason to have Flash on your site. It was just so frustrating to use standard HTML forms to upload multiple files. You had to select each individual file one at a time. But now, along comes HTML5 with multiple file upload. Progress indicators are now also possible. There is even an example of a drag and drop multiple file upload. The future of useful web applications is bright, but Flash won’t be there.

Google Chrome Browser

The internet is a buzz since Google's release yesterday of its browser named Chrome. There are many wild predictions about its future, what it means for Microsoft and Firefox and a share of nay sayers. I downloaded and to it for a test drive myself. But I waited a day to see what reactions would be and if more detailed information came to light before I went shooting my mouth. Overall the reaction seems to be very positive.

A number of things stand out about Chrome.

1. On the surface, its page rendering seems fast. It uses WebKit
2. Browser tabs are spawned as separate tasks. This the most talked about feature so far, because it means that if one website's scripts are running slow, the other tabs will not slow down. The problem child can then be killed off. This point gets my vote.
3. Chrome uses the V8 JavaScript engine. It means Chrome has speed advantages over many of the other browsers.

The general consensus seems to be that the new browser is clear pitched at web applications, and specifically web applications that continue to work when off line. Many see this as the way of the future, where applications are not tied to any one particular operating system, and are available anywhere, any time.

The browser then coupled with Google's Gears, a collection of web widgets, clearly puts in competition with Adobe's Air and Microsoft's Silverlight. As JavaScript engines become faster and if a standard HTML video element was adopted, the future looks dim for these two proprietary platforms. This is one point that seems to have garnered much applause from the technical community.

The next thing that seems to be rather sensational and wildly exaggerated, is that Chrome is Window's killer. As many people have pointed out, Chrome needs an operating system to support it. So Windows is not about to go away. But, where it does spell trouble for Microsoft, is when Chrome and other browsers create a fast, stable platform for web based productivity software, its Office cash cow is in serious trouble.

For me, it has been interesting to use Chrome for the past day, but four things stop me from using it more regularly.

1. No add ons – I love my Firefox ad blocker, Firebug development debugging tool, as a developer, I can't live without this one.
2. Its CSS rendering is not up to date. It fails the Acid 3 test. My WordPress admin theme does not work properly. So I'm using Firefox right now to write this.
3. There seems to be some JavaScipt incompatibility, some of the WordPress Editor Monkey features didn't work.
4. I can't install Flash. While this Chrome is meant to ultimately mean the demise of this platform, the nearly the whole internet still uses it. For instance, Google's own Analytics.

None of the other browsers are sitting still, so the competition is on. I believe we can expect to see some amazing developments from all of the browsers in the near future.