Eric Knorr: ¨Stop Bashing Flash¨

spoton · May 3, 2010 12:31PM

http://www.infoworld.com/t/rich-inte...hing-flash-496

Quote:

It didn't take long for Microsoft to chime in. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for Internet Explorer, bashed Flash's "reliability, security, and performance" (same three words, same order) in Microsoft's IE Blog just hours after Jobs posted. And he offers the broad assertion as Jobs: "The future of the Web is HTML5."

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What could possibly motivate Microsoft and Apple to agree on anything?

Quote:

....H.264 will be the only video codec natively supported by IE9 -- and should be the codec of choice for HTML5. Both Silverlight and Flash already support H.264, but due to licensing restrictions (you can't embed a proprietary codec in a pure open source browser), Firefox cannot provide native support. In an HTML5 future where neither Flash nor Silverlight will be required to play embedded Web video, Firefox gets aced out..

This chart explains it all, IE (and likely Safari) is losing share to Firefox´s growing popularity.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

Why is Firefox so popular? It gives users a lot of choice, it puts the user in control.

Firefox is a shining example of what being ¨Open" is all about and Apple and Microsoft want to kill it.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html

Marvin · May 3, 2010 3:23PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SpotOn

Why is Firefox so popular? It gives users a lot of choice, it puts the user in control.

No, it's because it's the best browser on Windows that's not Internet Explorer and Windows has close to 90% marketshare. Safari isn't that good on Windows.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SpotOn

Firefox is a shining example of what being ¨Open" is all about and Apple and Microsoft want to kill it.

Neither Apple nor Microsoft control H.264 licensing and the codec is by far the best technology and very widely used/supported. Supporting it is no worse than supporting MPEG-2, which last time I checked was quite popular and controlled by the same people who control H.264:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/default.aspx

People seem to be using DVDs just fine and authoring home movies with MPEG-2.

Open compressors have their benefits but as always what happens is that people get hold of the code, make some slight improvements and then people start authoring video that browsers can't decode properly. That's not good for an accessible internet.

The problem faced by Firefox can be simply overcome by offloading video decoding to the operating system like how Apple does it with the Quicktime system component. The decoder doesn't need to ship with the browser itself.

hmurchison · May 3, 2010 4:07PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SpotOn

http://www.infoworld.com/t/rich-inte...hing-flash-496

This chart explains it all, IE (and likely Safari) is losing share to Firefox´s growing popularity.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

Why is Firefox so popular? It gives users a lot of choice, it puts the user in control.

Firefox is a shining example of what being ¨Open" is all about and Apple and Microsoft want to kill it.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html

Unsubstantiated and baseless. Apple likely has no desire to kill Firefox.

spoton · May 3, 2010 5:00PM

ha, funny

programmer · May 9, 2010 7:56PM

Flash is a proprietary nightmare. The biggest thing it has going for it are authoring tools which could be fairly easily repurposed to output HTML5. The Flash runtime technology is unreliable, non-performant, awkward, dependent on Adobe to port it, a security nightmare, bloated, and forced to be plug-in based because it is proprietary. Everyone should be trying to kill it, not just Apple & Microsoft.

Eric Knorr: ¨Stop Bashing Flash¨

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