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.
| Flash | HTML5 | |
| Video | FLV, F4V, H.264 | Ogg – FireFox H.264 – Safari, Chrome, IE9 |
| Audio | MP3 | FireFox, Safari, Chrome |
| Multiple File Upload | yes | yes |
| Vector Graphics | Fla (proprietry) | SVG (open standard) |
| Animation | ActionScript | JavaScript |
| Scripting | ActionScript | JavaScript |
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.
