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Comment by Asa-Nisse | Hacker News Reader

The point is that flash is a fading technology now... in a few years HTML5 will replace it for video purposes. The iPhone is a better gaming plattform. What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser (think of the market for the already developed games to the iPhone)

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* flash is a fading technology now... in a few years HTML5 will replace it for video purposes. *

In a few years people will be using HTML5 video, and fall back to flash where not available. A few more years after that, maybe things will be different.

I dont think so. All the big sites are converting to HTML5 now since the highest paying audience is on the iPad. New features will be targeted to that market first as well.

The flash audience will be second class citizens. But with users needing only to change their browsers for a better experience, I think they will do so surprisingly quickly.

OH YEAH!! Because users are renowned for updating their browsers. Flash has 99% of the market. I would gather that 90% of users on the internet don't have a friggin' clue what this whole debate is about and wont care how they view their videos. I like the idea of HTML5, but if it takes off like many preach, users will probably notice how everything is a little less polished and a little more crappy. Then they'll still not care.

"What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser"

Like Mircosoft tried to with with ActiveX? I don't think so...

After what we've seen lately it seems that many Apple users WOULD love it. The end users are the ones here getting hurt by these grudges - why can't they see it? There are great Unity3D, Appcelerator, and Flash apps that will never be made on the App store. How does that not bother you as an end user?

Heard of Google NaCl?

Yeah. Native code in a browser without the security implications.

And without all that pesky portability either.

I see no evidence that Flash is fading technology -- I suspect it's usage is increasing a regular rate even now. Almost every game on the web is a Flash game. How many millions of people play Flash games on Facebook?

HTML5 may replace it for video purposes but that's only one (recent) thing that Flash is used for. If you have an iPhone 3GS right now, Apple will have long stopped providing updates before HTML has supplanted Flash for all things. Hell, HTML5 isn't even a standard yet.

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