Mozilla warns of Flash and Silverlight 'agenda' | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla warns of Flash and Silverlight 'agenda'

news.zdnet.com

10 pointsbdfh4212 comments

He conceded that "if you want to have a commercially viable website, in most cases you need Flash,"

What?

Anyway, it's true that Flash is "The Next Frontier." Remember when you couldn't bank online from Linux? Those days are mostly over, but now it's "I can't use Scribd from Linux."

What someone should do is make javascript + svg as easy to develop in as Flash. I assume that means some shiny IDE, but I've never used Flash so I'm not sure. Basically, make it easy for people to do things portably, and they might try. (Then again, some people don't really like learning, so they'll use Flash forever.)

Oh, as always... some great comments on the site:

Quit trying to paint proprietary software as some dark evil and open source and open standards and open everytyhing as the only true way of the "good people".

It was a closed network in teh beginning and only those that want to make their code, site, whatever open should do so. Those that do not, have no obligation. Proprietary software has created a huge amount of business for the world at large and has been nothing but beneficial by and large.

Socialism is nice, if you don't mind suffering through crushing government control.

So in the same light as things like this: Proprietary software is patriotic and good and keeps the government out of our lives, where it belongs. Less government control and a free society is GOOD..GOOD..GOOD.

Open software relies too heavily on the government and government control and living under the government's thumb. It's is socialist software. Socialism is BAD. BAD BAD...

Stuff like this makes me want to cry.

Gaah. I'd really like to know how this guy came to the conclusion that FOSS relies on the government. WTF?

"HTML 5 is currently a work in progress. Although the specification can be used in some cases now, it is not likely to reach completion until 2010 at the very earliest."

Flash and Silverlight WILL take over if the W3C cannot decide on HTML 5 standards faster than that. People aren't going to wait around for some standards committee to deliberate years on a final spec. 2010 is sooo far away in internet years its ridiculous.

Yerp, but not a word about this. Flash and Silverlight are here, ready-to-go now. How long before HTML 5 even remotely has any kind of saturation on the desktop, so that we can program against it? 5 years? There is some magic about an "upgradable browser" via plug-ins.

Our next app is using Flash. Another one goes that way..

I am hoping for a quick and widespread adoption of various mobile devices without Flash and Silverlight support with embedded Opera/Mozila/WebKit as primary web runtimes. I hope Adobe will lead the way and refuse to include Flash support into their next iPhone/iPodTouch.

Once mobile standards-compliant users start representing sizeable portion of the web traffic, idiotic website builders will learn to stay away from Flash.

This is true, but unfortunately only really with the iPhone. Flash Lite works on all of the other handsets that matter right now. And its really Apple keeping the gate closed on Adobe, not the other way around.

I agree though, widespread mobile adoption of Flash (and any other browser plugin) will be seriously slowed while Apple does not let them in the iPhone. The thought of having to make completely different javascript and flash versions of a web app is not very attractive when you could just focus on a javascript version that works on both.

Adobe is already one step ahead. They just announced the "open screen project", which opens up the swf and flv file formats. This also lets people create their own swf runtimes.

Nitot seems to be a little disconnected. He mentions "In HTML 5 there will be video and audio; you won't need Flash for video and audio". However, video and audio are only a small subset of sites that require flash. I think there is a general need for an optimized runtime, especially for things like web-based games and rich presentations, and HTML has a long way to go in supporting these.

However, video and audio are only a small subset of sites that require flash.

Granted, in terms of "number of Flash files downloaded" or "number of sites serving Flash content", the percent of video/audio-only Flash files may be small.

But in terms of "number of Flash files downloaded that people actually came to the site to see" or "number of Flash files people would watch even if they were running Flashblock", I'd guess that audio/video-only files account for almost all of them.

As a developer and an end-user, I don't like anything that requires a plugin, and I feel that is the consensus among everyone but desktop developers.

Well written AJAX & Java just work better and don't require some annoying plugin, download, or upgrade.

And on a sidenote, if you're on a Mac pay attention to CPU and memory usage anytime the slightest amount of flash is being used on a page, it skyrockets, totally inefficient for no particular reason. It seems SLIGHTLY better in Windows but it's still a total resource hog.

Should Flash and Silverlight really be put into the same boat?

They are both plug-ins, but Flash has been around for at least a decade. Flash is used for YouTube, ensuring it has nearly complete saturation. Flash should be considered part of everyone's browser these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com