Microsoft Barring Certain Staff From Buying Macs, iPads?

[commodorejohn]

If only they'd done this with whatever marketing ninnies were behind Metro Team...

[commodorejohn]

Flash isn't going anywhere just yet, I don't think. HTML5 adoption seems a bit dead in the water at this point - some sites have offered the option, very few have converted altogether, and some (like The Escapist) have made the aggravating choice to make HTML5 content a premium thing, missing the point entirely. Flash has its problems, to be sure, but it's also got sixteen years of accumulated content and support, and that doesn't just change overnight the moment someone comes out with a new standard.

And HTML5 is not without its problems, either: for one thing, it depends entirely on your browser having a good Javascript engine; not all HTML5-capable browsers do, and for some of us who live on lower-end equipment, upgrading to a flashy new browser that eats memory like popcorn and enables all kinds of annoying new tricks by bad Web designers to impair usability, all for the sake of enjoying replications of functionality Flash already provides, is not an option. It also suffers from being designed especially for streaming content and "web apps," and thus it doesn't (to my knowledge) have a container format like Flash does. There's no equivalent of an SWF that you can store a complete cartoon or game in and upload to Newgrounds; you'd need to have the whole mess of resource files uploaded in their proper hierarchy. Pain. In. The. Ass.

I have never once seen Silverlight on any site other than Microsoft's.

[commodorejohn]

No argument on the idiocy, but when the alternative isn't really an improvement, you have to question just how far adoption is going to go...

[commodorejohn]

I imagine that's why it's taken so long. I am surprised we haven't seen the likes of google (who aren't less evil, but at least have more of a vested interest in a relatively open standard) throw weight behind it.

Ironically, I guess with the proliferation of i-stuff, that might end up doing more to end flash than anything else.

Well, Google supported HTML5 (at least on YouTube) almost from the moment major browsers had decent support for it - but I don't think they're going to try and abandon Flash. Sabotaging capability in order to stick it to a competitor is more Apple's turf; if Google were to, say, remove support for the Flash plugin from Chrome, all that would happen is people wouldn't be able to watch Homestar Runner or Newgrounds or whatever, and they'd move over to Firefox or something. You can't pull that kind of thing off without a captive market; and while Apple and iOS did do just that, I'd note that one of the first things my brother did once he jailbroke his iPad was to put Flash on it.

It's the same problem faced by any new technology: if the advantages don't outweigh the burdens of conversion, there won't be much converting. Currently HTML5 offers some advantages for a few applications and not many for others, and it doesn't (as near as I can tell) have the tooling Flash does. Flash, meanwhile, has a massive userbase and mature development tools, as well as being better-suited to many things than HTML5. We'll see how this develops in the future, but at the moment the case for HTML5 pretty much comes down to "it's not controlled by one company," and there's not a lot of people who really care that much about it.