Ok – I’m done. I do appreciate your comment. Your point is a good one.

Can you send me a list of sites that cause the issues? If you are not comfortable leaving it here, please email me at gregsramblings@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Greg

I noticed Disney has updated their site to use less Flash, used to be entirely Flash, but they still uses a ton of Flash. They are a great example of why Flash is not going anywhere anytime soon, to replace all their games, videos and to be completely HTML5 will take forever. Steve Jobs is on their board, but they have to face all the realities addressed above, so they will be a good indicator of where technology will go and how soon it will get there.

BTW, I just worked on a site for a large company that starts with a “D” and they wanted an all HTML5 site with Flash fallback for IE. Many of the request we have been done must faster in Flash, but they wanted a Flash type UI in HTML5, but still work on all browsers. What a nightmare, there are so many browser based exceptions in our code, it reminds me of HTML in the late 90′s early 2000s, The problem now is that we have two – three times as many browsers to code for then we did 10 years ago.

If I go view a page for which I don’t have full HTML5 support, the page just looks wrong. If I view a page heavy with Flash, the browser crashes and it costs me time ($) to get back to work.

Adobe, please get off your ass and fix Flash. I’ve had to relaunch my browsers three times today so far, with Flash 10.1.53.64.

Also like you I suspect we will see adoption rates of browsers increase with HTML 5 as devs will build stuff that require it. When a user stumbles across a site that needs a newer browser they will probably install it. This is why the Flash Player has such good penetration as people dev stuff that required new versions, users come across it and upgrade, but this hasn’t been the case with HTML, HTML devs instead opting for graceful degrdation.

While its nice to see the statistics presented side by side like that, I think the majority of developers are fully aware of the imbalance. The problem is not with the actuality of the situation but with the perception of the situation. Flash has always been a favourite (in my opinion unfair) whipping boy of the standards crowd, but from what I can see this attitude was always quite localised. You could predict what a person’s opinion of Flash was fairly accurately by the developer demographic they inhabited, and from my experience, once you left the environs of developers, people (clients/customers) were at worst ambivillent and at best enthusiatic about Flash. I think that this has now changed. The wave of negative publicity has penetrated outside the tech community on an alarming scale. Friends of mine who have no tech background whatsoever have mentioned this to me without prompting. One even mentioned Flash Player’s security vulnerabilities. I think the problem for Flash now is not statistical or for the most part based on fact or evidence, but is a problem of (mis)perception, and from talking with other Flash developers, there is a strong lack of confidence in Adobe’s ability to reverse this situation.