Comment by mvip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mvip | Hacker News Reader

Flash is the new Internet Explorer. I remember a point in time when it was painful to use browsers other than IE, because so many developers took the easy way out and only supported IE (and their managers didn't know/care). Those days are of course over (well, mostly at least).

Flash is, or at least used to be, the easy way out. People used it because it was easier than HTML5. Hence, when a company asks for a quote on an interactive site they often went for the Flash-version because it was cheaper (and not fully knowing the drawbacks).

Apple forced a change in the market. All of the sudden, these people who ordered the new project in Flash realized that they couldn't view the content on their shiny new toy.

You might argue the ability of using Flash as an option. I see the fact that both Apple (and now Google) have actively taken a stance against Flash as something good for the society as a whole. It's a step towards better, and more open standards.

This isn't to say that Flash is completely useless. Not too long ago, it wasn't even possible to do interactive things with HTML. At that point, Flash was the only option. Luckily, those days are over.

> People who used it because it was easier than HTML5.

Having developed both HTML5 and Flash applications, your use of the word was shows a bit of ignorance when it comes to Flash. It is still easier in Flash to do a high-velocity, interactive site that works across multiple browsers. If you think differently, you're not actually doing the work.

Armchair critics of Flash just regurgitate what they perceive is truth – HTML5's abilities are on par with Flash. But it isn't true. To be clear, my support is with HTML5, not Flash. But as someone who works with both daily, I'd be pretty biased if I went around telling people that HTML5 is a trouble-free alternative to Flash. That would be a pretty big lie.

> Luckily, those days are over.

They are far from over. People cite YouTube HTML5 player without considering how vlogs are actually recorded, processed and uploaded through Flash. As the viewer, it's a nice luxury to say it can all be done through HTML5, but as a producer of content you'd have a different opinion. We all know about Web Audio API[1] and Capture API[2]. No need to mention how they are X years away. They aren't here today.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/audioproc/ [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-capture-api-20100401/

I interpreted the was to mean it was an option. Flash used to be the easiest option. Now with the runtime not being present on apple devices and it's total demise imminent, it's still just as easy to use but it's no longer a viable option.

If you're an iOS user, HTML5 is a magical place where you can do anything – outside of iOS, it's hit or miss. And if it's hit or miss, it might as well be Flash.

Remember that a client's perspective is often neat, cool and fun rather than works on all devices the exact same.

Flash will die when HTML5 signs the cheques that it's collective evangelicals cash.

Can you expand about what is neat with HTML(5) on ios? personally the only thing I saw was desolation and poor performance. I rarely saw anything neat cool and fun in html5 for ios..

I surely missed something I guess. I think it's a shame we are not going to have flash on android tablets, it's somewhere it could have perform well.

I agree. Problem is, this Flash vs. HTML5 rhetoric has people mixing in "it can do everything Flash does" and "Flash doesn't work on mobile" leading the implication that if you want to do an elaborate, highly interactive experience, it'll work on mobile and it'll be better than Flash. You see how self-serving that argument is?

They are far from over. People cite YouTube HTML5 player without considering how vlogs are actually recorded, processed and uploaded through Flash. As the viewer, it's a nice luxury to say it can all be done through HTML5, but as a producer of content you'd have a different opinion.

Huh? How many vlogs are "actually recorded, processed and uploaded through Flash"?

I don't think many people, and certainly not many professional vlogers, use a Flash based vlog recording and processing solution. (Including both the Adobe Flash authoring environment/flv encoding tools AND any bizarro online flash vlog recording service which uses the computer's camera).

In YT's early days it was mostly people recording vlongs and responses from their webcam. YouTube. Get it? Certainly professional vloggers would rather use a nicely cut, professionally edited version. But that doesn't represent the majority of YT users. That bizarro world you talk about is the underpinnings of YT's critical mass.

Many wrong assumptions here.

1) People did produce vlogs and responses from their webcam. You got that right. But this has nothing to do with Flash, and it's ability to use the webcam on a flash app. People making vlogs with their webcam just used one of several commercial video apps to create them, not some flash page.

2) I seriously doubt vlogs were "the underpinnings of YT's critical mass". YT got popular because of its videos (of cats, songs, babes, funny stuff, etc), not because of video blogging or the NUMA guy.

> People did produce vlogs and responses from their webcam. You got that right. But this has nothing to do with Flash

It has everything to do with Flash. Flash was the only reliable way to record via webcam and have it instantly available. I say that it contributed to YT's critical mass because YT made it easy for anyone to record and upload. No crappy bundled webcam software could beat that. YT didn't need to explain it. No "if you have this webcam, use this software" or "open Quicktime and export as a .mpg, then..." BS. Record, hit stop, hit upload. Done.

> I seriously doubt vlogs were "the underpinnings of YT's critical mass". YT got popular because of its videos (of cats, songs, babes, funny stuff, etc)

You have to respect that YT is a community, one with a pretty significant voice. Type in "sopa", "war in iraq", or "arab spring" and see how many cat videos you get. Video sites were already around - a video site you could contribute your voice to - that's what made YT a success.

It has everything to do with Flash. Flash was the only reliable way to record via webcam and have it instantly available.

Citation needed. I don't know of ANY remotely popular flash vlog recording service of the time. Not to mention that vlogs in general never got that popular, period.

You have to respect that YT is a community, one with a pretty significant voice. Type in "sopa", "war in iraq", or "arab spring" and see how many cat videos you get.

YT is not a community at all. It has tens of millions of extremely diverse members. You can find any kind of shit in YT, from democratic, to republican, to anarchistic, to pro-nazi, to various nationalisms, to kittens, to porn, to full length movies, to ads, to high culture, to fart jokes, ... What part seems like a specific community with a voice to you? It's just the assemblage of millions of individual tastes and opinions.

The fact you can find things about sopa, war in iraq, arab spring etc does not mean anything of the sort of YT being a "community" with a "voice". It's like finding emails and blog posts about such issues: of course you will, there are millions of bloggers, thousands of them are bound to write about the issues of the day.

> You might argue the ability of using Flash as an option. I see the fact that both Apple (and now Google have) actively taken a stance against Flash as something good for the society as a whole. It's a step towards better, and more open standards.

If only Apple took the same stance regarding video codecs, too, and embrace WebM. But the truth is they support what is convenient for them at the time. If it also happens to help the society in the long term - great. But it's not their main priority.

Yeah, you're right. Apple isn't only killing Flash because it is good for the society. They're doing it because the user experience would suffer. That isn't the case with video codecs unfortunately, but it would have been great if Apple did embrace WebM, but I don't see that happening in a near future.

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