Submitted by Microsoft announced during the build conference, and Steve Sinofsky reiterated in a blog posting that: “For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free. The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web.” Sinfosky goes on explain why Microsoft will not include Flash and why it’s no longer needed. It’s as close as we’ll get to an obituary for Flash. Update from Thom: Added a note in the ‘read more’!
Update from Thom
The Flashless iOS was the first punch in the face of Flash – it was far from down and out, but it was a little groggy. Further punches in the face came from Adobe’s complete and utter inability to bring Flash to mobile devices. Flash doesn’t work as it should on Android or webOS – slow, touch unfriendly, and a power hog.
And now this. This is Microsoft kicking Flash to the curb. The world’s most popular operating system will not be receptive to Flash, and Microsoft openly stating Flash is history pretty much means that as a platform for the web, it’s done. Flash may still serve a purpose in other ways, but the Flash most of us know and hate – that’s gone.
This is good news for the web. I do think Adobe has had enough time to make Flash work properly on mobile, and they simply failed. Since the release of the iPhone, Adobe promised us a working Flash on mobile, and now, four years down the line, it’s still not there. Between then and now, we’ve seen entirely new mobile operating systems rise, we’ve seen an entire Windows release, and another one being made, several Mac OS X releases, and so on. Yet, Flash still isn’t ready?
You had your chance, Adobe. You failed.
Or does this mean that MS will be buying Adobe and combine Flash and Silvrlight into a far worse tumor on the internet?
I thought the original release of the iPhone was the obituary for Flash.
WTF is “Metro” style browsing?
Yeah, kill flash, introduce native-Metro-only-MS-only-Win8 feature (even imaginary), and claim you have moved web to brighter future!
It means browsing the web under the Microsoft Bob… er, I mean… Metro UI, where touch is king.
From what I understand, MS’ Metro version of HTML5/Javascript has all kinds of proprietary crap baked into the WinRT API, so of course it’ll only work on Windows. Remember when they were all gung ho about Java? Yeah, I guess you could say this is like Visual J++ all over again …
webOS also had extensions to HTML/Javascript. You can’t build a good Metro-style interface without these extensions, because HTML/CSS are crap for UI.
Javascript seems to be standard, though. Calls to the API don’t classify as “extensions.”
That “proprietary crap” is not meant for the web, but metro apps. WinRT isn’t meant for the web, but for Windows apps. I know you know this, I’ve seen your posts, you aren’t stupid, though you seem to be pretending here.
Thom, have you actually used a browser with flash support on WebOS or Android for a longer period of time? On my Android the occasional video works just fine. I don’t encounter much flash though. I don’t hunt for flash sites to see if the work or not, but when something is only available in flash is has so far _always_ worked. I don’t see anoying ads and it certainly does not drain my battery.
I want a open and royalty free web probably more than the next guy, but Flash on Android isn’t as bad as Steve has made you believe.
Seconded. I’ve streamed several hours of video from Amazon Prime to my Touchpad, and I found the performance at times better than my cr48.
Yeah, well it sucks on my Samsung Captivate. Maybe they put all their tweaks into webos? Or maybe running flash through a pseudo JVM isn’t the best idea in the world?
These are just the cookie cutter reasons for why people say flash sucks. If you ask for evidence, there really is none.
Its similar to why “linux is awsome” and why “windows sucks”. The people who say this are generally just repeating what they read or what someone told them. They dont really know if its true or why.
Its just that right now, the big “in” thing is to hate flash and push the newest buzz word instead.
Edited 2011-09-17 00:11 UTC
I hate programming in AS3, the Prototype girl getting drunk & laid with Mr OO & then having a child that has great identity problems.
That said, nutters seems to more & more enjoy gaming inside the browser. Possibly it’s the halved framerate or cosy CPU fans that appeal to them.
Existing plugins for 3d (e.g Unity) has low coverage and frankly is not that stable, at least on Mac. Yes, you’re right, we’re seeing HTML5 3d support confusedly peeking out from holes in the ground in various incarnations, but, a new flash version usually has ~90% of (non tablet) browsers covered in like a year. For someone betting their small company in one tech, I’d say that Flash 11, on paper, would look quite appealing.
So, personally, I’m not sure Flash got the final shot in the neck. I will not wear black clothes for a month when it does; I’m just making an observation.
I don’t really get it. Will they drop flash in favor of Silverlight and HTML5, or latter alone?
If it’s about replacing flash with silverlight … well, that would be replacing one proprietary technology to another proprietary technology, which is bad. And … Silverlight is no way better than other plugins. It’s still closed as the gates of heaven and hell.
HTML5 alone – yeah. Go for it, but NOT with this terrible, tablet-only, counterintuituve interface called “Metro”.
Their doing away with ActiveX controls basically. Anything not built into the browser is considered ‘unsavory’ and will require an explicit user switch to enable.
]{
The former… well, not, it’s not quite that clear cut. Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) both use XAML as their GUI markup language. Silverlight is a web oriented implementation (akin to “Flash” and “Flex”), while WPF is a desktop oriented framework. Both Silverlight and WPF share an awful lot of basic functionality – it’s just that Silverlght doesn’t attempt to use the baggage of “desktop” metaphor. The actual UI code can look very, very similar (it being an XML based markup.) On the programming side, again, Silverlight is sandboxed and has a limited access to certain operations (like file operations, etc – basically, stuff you would never want a browser based plug-in to access or have as a capability.) But, really? An experienced .Net dev can jump on to Silverlight reasonably quickly, especially if they have some exposure to WPF, rather than just classic WinForms.
So, what have Microsoft actually done? They have created a middle ground solution, based on the same technologies as Silverlight and WPF. XAML for the UI, and the use of the basic runtime (wrapped up) in a similar way to the way C# apps currently work. They’ve extended this to allow Javascript and C/C++ interoperability… NOT COM, something new – “projections” – which are API wrappers that present a version of the API to the programmer in a fully seamless way (as if it was part of the usual API.) They’ve also decided to make most API calls asynchronous, and make creating/calling async methods trivial. The UI “Metro” is wrapped up and presented through this mechanism. All of this falls under the banner of WinRT.
No – it’s more like “here is a new way of accessing the API and your legacy Win32 style API is effectively dead outside of the classic desktop.”
Silverlight is, has always been, and never was anything other than a subset of the .Net CLR.
Silverlight is at least a fully modern and multithreaded platform – akin Java’s Applets from a browser perspective. Flash is a horrible hacked single threaded pile of crud. When you use Flash outside of the nice streamlined Flex framework, you quickly realise how inappropriate the Flash plugin is for anything more than banner ads – indeed it’s pretty astounding that it even made it this far. (the raw Flash API talks about movies, scenes and such – it really was designed for something else entirely…)
No, that’s not what you’re getting. Metro API is accessible to any supported language through WinRT. It’s not “HTML5 only” at all. In fact, it’s not even “tablet only” as the Metro UI is slated to be the “main” UI for Win 8 – at least for the “start menu” style app selection.
So if there’s no plugin support, not only does that mean no Flash or Silverlight, but that also means no QUICKTIME either, which makes me a happy camper
The only downside to not having Flash is that most of the ads on the web are/were in Flash, so if you ran a Flashblock extension, that pretty much zapped a lot of them at once.
It also means no support for OGG, FLAC, Theora, and anything else that MS chooses not to support.
I don’t really think that’s the case. Different file formats could be supported using codecs without a unique plug-in.
You don’t need QuickTime on Windows because H.264 is built in. It does does raise a question about other codecs.
That’s why they upload HTML5 videos on their “building Windows 8” blog. And that’s why, if I want to watch those videos full screen, I first have to download them and open them with a native media player… bringing back memories.
Future of the web indeed.
HTML video is really a horrible experience. I usually have to switch browsers to view a video or another, sometimes it just doesn’t load, others it hogs my CPU like there’s no tomorrow … it reminds me of the days before Flash video when you had WMP and Realvideo widgets embeded in pages. The horror!!!
Oh and BTW, Flash on my Galaxy S works just fine.
Adobe said they would add WebM support to Flash, not sure if they already did that.
But this could be one way to make sure that WebM works almost everywhere. Because Flash could be used as a fallback to codec support in the browser.
So I don’t know if this article means that Flash and Silverlight are not installed by default or if plugins are not supported at all.
Anyway this could be a bit of a blow for WebM too.
Adobe enthusiastically announced VP8 support after Google’s takeover of On2. After that it has been very quiet about it.
Occhams razor suggests mpeg-la showcased their guns over lunch and then Adobe dropped the idea.
thank fu*K!
The title of this article is a bit misleading, Microsoft isn’t abandoning Flash and Silverlight in Windows 8, they are abandoning Flash and Silverlight in IE10 when running under Metro. Flash and Silverlight runs fine under IE10 in the classic desktop and as standalone applications. I would expect Adobe to sooner or later make Flash apps run on top of WinRT allowing Metro apps to be built with Flash.
Silverlight is in a weird position for Windows 8. It is a limited .NET variant with XAML at its core, and deep integration through Expression Blend, while Metro apps can be built with .NET, have XAML at their core and feature deep integration with Expression Blend. They are not directly compatible, but anything previously built with Silverlight can fairly easily be brought over to the more complete and most likely more “final” Metro stack. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will end up killing off Silverlight and letting developers do the work to port their stuff over to Metro or if they will simply make Silverlight 6 a part of the Metro stack.
No, they won’t install it on Windows 8 at all. A user can install it for use with both the metro version of IE browser and the legacy IE (which are, in fact, the same IE, just with different chrome).
Also, the OEM’s can totally fuck up Microsoft’s plan and probably will.
]{
Isn’t that the way Windows 7 already is? I don’t think Windows 7 as Silverlight bundled with it, so there’s no difference (feel free to correct me).
Sure OEMs can install it and whatever else they want, but that’s always been the case.
This site has a tendency to overstate things in the headlines… and the articles themselves.
For example, IIRC, just yesterday there was an article declaring the Win32 API as “dead” or “the past” or whatever, but Metro apps can indeed make Win32 API calls – albeit only a subset (they can’t make any of the Win32 UI or GDI calls for example).
Well, they just said at build that if you bypass the limitations of WinRT (meaning you try to make Win32 API calls other then the designated COM interfaces) Microsoft will not allow you to sell your app in their app store.
So, sure, you can do all sorts of hacktastic things in your code including call the Win32 API but officially this is not something you should do.
And, honestly, why would you want to? The whole point here is to migrate away from the Win32 api to WinRT. Using the Win32 API will mean that your app will break when they make that whole stack optional.
]{
Edited 2011-09-15 19:58 UTC
Considering that Metro is the default interface in Windows 8 then yes they are.
I did say Silverlight was going the journey when it came to Metro development bit everyone wanted to cover their ears.
Great news, regardless of whether Flash is even a good technology or not. The web should be free from plugins and other proprietary technology.
Now, if they only would support WebM.
there’s no standard codec for <video> and firefox and chrome doesn’t support h.264
On desktop you can easily add WebM support to IE <video> tag. Not sure about mobile.
yes but you can simply include two sources under the video tag, one for h.264 and one for WebM
Bad solution, since it doubles your storage requirements.
Ok, well, for you maybe, but for 99% of commercial web sites this won’t be an issue. Most also keep smaller versions of the same video (in two formats) for mobile users, sometimes different compressions for different bandwidth, etc.
Turn it around.
Firefox, Opera and Chrome support WebM but not h.264, while IE9+ and safari can support WebM if a WebM codec is installed in the OS multimedia system.
Therefore, the only logical choice for website makers for HTML5 web video is WebM. Windows and Mac OSX users can still run IE9+ or Safari by installing a WebM codec.
Yes, the only culprits remaining are mobile Safari and IE.
Ah – “book them and they will come”, famous last words. So, we substitute one dependency for another? Sounds like a lovely utopia.
Thom’s ‘note’ is deeply misinformed.
Adobe’s been shipping a tool to create first class flash based apps for Android and iOS since June (Android since January). This includes an entire re-write of their Flex widget toolkit with touch-optimized sizing and interaction metaphors (flingable lists without scrollbars, etc…)
The flash player and AIR run time have also been updated to support touch gestures, including multi-touch.
So if you are using the Flex based Adobe toolkit, you are set. If you are using other more low level flash content creation tools, the onus is not on Adobe to produce touch friendly interfaces. They’ve provided the hooks to intercept touch gestures, it’s up to content creators to make their UIs touch friendly with big buttons, and simplified interfaces.
I think you missed this part:
“Flash may still serve a purpose in other ways, but the Flash most of us know and hate – that’s gone.”
You said:
“I do think Adobe has had enough time to make Flash work properly on mobile, and they simply failed. Since the release of the iPhone, Adobe promised us a working Flash on mobile, and now, four years down the line, it’s still not there.”
This is patently incorrect.
Indeed he is wrong about this. Apple has steadfastly said they don’t want Flash on their platforms so there’s nothing Adobe can do about that, but I have a working Flash implementation on my Android phone. Flash is indeed there.
Actually you can compile your flash app into a iOS app with relative ease. Adobe simply bundles a version of the AIR run time with each app. A tad inefficient in terms of app size, but it works, and Apple’s policy reversal on non-native apps allows it.
Yes, you can. Case in point Machinarium – a flash game, now on iOS – COOoo..l.. er… iPad 2 minimum? (WHAT?) So it “requires” the device with the largest amount of RAM and fastest processor and best graphics?!?!? – baring in mind I’ve played this on a 1.66Mhz Atom based Netbook under Windows 7 and it ran reasonably smoothly with 1GB RAM and intel integrated graphics (MSi Wind u100 – google the specs)…. I don’t think anyone has much to worry about with Adobe and Flash native compilation.. it’s not optimised and pretty much niche and is likely to stay that way knowing Adobe.
Yep, Flash will become (already is) a cross platform development tool.
It a tougher market though but they have all these dev’s who are going to be looking for new jobs.
No, it’s not cross platform enough. There is no flash on Meego/Harmattan N9:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/901668?tstart=60
HMTL/JavaScript is the way to go.
Edited 2011-09-15 17:30 UTC
No, JavaScript is a horrible language and I’d rather write assembly than that (okay, maybe it’s not that bad…)
Having a single core written in C/C++/C#/Java/whatever language that wasn’t invented to script websites and separate UIs for each platform is the way to go.
We are talking about the Web, right? What does C/C++ (or C# or whatever) has to do with it? So far JavaScript is the only de-facto ubiquitous Web scripting language which browsers support.
When you write native code, that’s another story.
Edited 2011-09-15 20:48 UTC
Javascript isn’t a horrible language. This isn’t the 90s any more.
It’s always interesting to see non-devs analyze the decline of Flash on the web, and point to “performance problems” and things like that. A developer worth anything would easily explain that in order for anything to run well on a single core – sub 1Ghz any core – the content needs to be designed to run well on it. The same goes for moving to GPU rendering – it doesn’t work like a CPU – things need to be done differently. It has so much less to do with the runtime (Flash is just the runtime).
I am a developer, and specifically a web developer with an emphasis on Flash. I can tell you that most Flash content was meant to run on much faster hardware – out of order Intel CPUs in the 2Ghz range, usually with 2 or more cores. Content designed to run on that kind of hardware was never going to run well on a single core ARM CPU in the 1Ghz range.
That said, I think Adobe has done a fantastic job of getting performance up for their moble runtime. They’ve even made it relatively painless for a graphics intensive app like Machinarium (currently built using the iOS version of AIR, which is mostly Flash) to be ported with relative ease. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/machinarium/id459189186?mt=8
Machinarium perfectly highlights design leading performance, even if most of the media – those who don’t actually develop anything – missed it. That game was meant to run on much faster hardware – at least a pentium 4 1.8 Ghz CPU. Have a look: http://store.steampowered.com/app/40700
They got that to run well on a dual core 900Mhz ARMv7 CPU. That’s impressive in my book.
Flash use is declining, but what’s the real reason? It has everything to do with the setting that allowed Flash to thrive in the first place – you just couldn’t do certain things because IE6’s ubiquity prevented you from doing it. The choice was either don’t do cool things, or use Flash (or some other plugin – Unity3D, Java, etc.). Now that IE6 is pretty well and dead – we can finally do most of the cool things without the need for a plugin. In places where you used to sprinkle little Flash applets we are increasingly using jQuery and other so called “HTML5” tools (Ajax, DHTML, there’s a long list of dead marketing terms for these things – HTML45 is just the latest one).
Flash, Unity3D, and Java (even some others) still have places where it makes a lot more sense to use them, and they’ll continue to be used in those places (intranets, games, etc.) – but yeah, the ubiquitous time for Flash in the browser is certainly over- and it has nothing to do with Flash being terrible or any of those things Thom listed. All of those are nonsense, and totally miss the point.
There are a few things HTML5 can’t do yet. One of them is recoding video from a webcam. Even though Mozilla’s project Rainbow should finally fill that gap, it could still be several years away from being ready.
Also, The article was not clear, is Microsoft finally dropping Silverlight?
Edited 2011-09-15 14:48 UTC
My only complaint about Flash on Android is the lack of ability to install it on the SD card as my phone (N1) has too little flash disk space, and I’m no where near ready to upgrade to a newer phone. So for now, it remains uninstalled. (Talked to Adobe about it, and they blame in on the Browser not running off SD card to start with since they are a plug-in to the the Browser.)
I see numerous comments celebrating the demise of flash.
Hold on a moment there. What about Adobe Acrobat for PDF? How about Java plugins? And does that mean we lose Youtube video? EBook reader plugins? Weather plugins? RSS feed plugins?
My favorite browser, Firefox, has a huge number of plugins, including my all time favorite, Firebug. Do we lose that too, as these plugins don’t espouse the Metro “ethos”???
“Oh! Windows 8 has an app for video, an app for PDF, an app for {fill in the blanks}, and they all work together!”. Do you really buy this? Right now, my acrobat reader works on my Linux box as well as my Windows machines. Will the Metro app do this too?
And while on the topic, can you see how quickly DotNet lookalikes like Mono are to be made obsolete? I pity those poor souls who thought to embrace Mono/C# as a way to cross platform support.
People are being shown a grid of labeled pictures, some moving and some not, and told that this is a “beautiful” interface- Just touch the box to launch your app full screen! Use your thumbs- who needs a mouse & keyboard? Used gestures and multitouch, it’s the new and better way… Out with the old, and in with the new.
For some reason or another, people are falling for this tripe. The way MS are achieving their speed, is by suspending any but the current foreground process- and they call this multitasking? Only by redefining the term can this be true.
To me, the “Metro” interface is just another way of launching apps, reminiscent of an old PDP11/23 multichannel analyser VT100 touch screen terminal interface I used in 1983. The difference there, was that the applications launched ran in real time, in the background, and only displayed on-screen when you switched to them. That old machine ran in just 64K words or memory, and implemented “Metro” in my opinion, better than MS can do today, almost 30 years later.
I am unconvinced that Metro is better than a traditional desktop, other than on small screen devices. It’s just a task switcher with a few bells and whistles that does not do justice to large screen hardware.
PDF is built into most browsers so this will be fine.
YouTube streams H.264 and WebM so your good.
Java on the client is already pretty dead.
I dont know, From where i stand Microsoft isnt abandoning anything. They have choose to have a version of their brower to run without plug-ins. Its the version (Metro) that is targeted for the tablet space. This makes total sense.
Unlike Android/WebOS where only a very small subset of plugins are available, IE in Windows 8 will be encumbered by supporting every single plug-in that exists for windows (thousands). This will be madness. Microsoft is giving folks a plug-less option while browsing. If you want plugins you have to use the desktop IE (which incidentally will be included in x86 Windows 8, we have not heard about ARM). This will save battery life, memory and cpu cycles.
While i am not a big fan of flash/silverlight and the closed web…there is “Nothing To See Here(tm)”
Edited 2011-09-15 15:45 UTC
Microsoft just announced that their new flagship OS won’t ship with Flash and they don’t recommend it.
Microsoft (the guys who control 90+% of the desktop) are saying ‘don’t use Flash’.
That’s a HUGE deal.
Windows doesn’t ship with Flash anyway.
OEMs may install it on their hardware, but Flash isn’t a part of Windows.
As I recall WinXP shipped with Flash, straight off of the MS disc. Did they stop doing that at some point?
When you think about it, this makes a kind of sense. Currently the plug-in architecture is pretty agnostic. It allows basically any DLL which supports the right API to take over a section of the browser canvas.
Now Metro it appears is entirely legacy free. Nothing you see in Metro depends on the win32 API as we know it. So running IE or any other browser in Metro, you can’t just allow Adobe’s flash player to load as a plug-in. You’d need most of the win32 API to support it, and that’s gone in Metro.
Now that doesn’t explain why IE won’t support a new WinRT plugin architecture. I doubt the flash player is closely coupled to win32, and could be ported to the WinRT IE plugin API pretty darned easily if such existed. There is no reason not to support a WinRT plugin architecture – and I betcha Microsoft will have to concede this at some point.
See, I read that as shooting yourself in the face. Instead of increasing productivity, they’re removing it (support for plugins.) There is already a massive push towards Android, this is just going to help that push. I won’t be suprised if Android completely eats Microsoft at this rate. (This is comming from a MS guy/admin.)
What bugs me most, is that they appear to be “betting the farm” on the new Metro UI. Windows 8 discards win32 and all that implies in favor of Metro. To me, that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Its not even as if anything in Metro is truly innovative.
When did anyone say anything about discarding win32?? The traditional desktop and API’s are still there, you just might not be able to utilize them for the Metro UI.
If you look at Microsoft’s latest stack diagrams you will see that WIn32 is no longer part of the modern stack – WinRT is not build on top of Win32 – and you can’t use it to build all those apps Microsoft claims are ‘the future’.
It’s unclear if Win32 will even be supported on ARM in Windows 8 and it will certainly be an optional install going forward.
So Win32 is not dead yet but it’s obituary has been written.
]{
You’re overstating things.
Here is a list of the Win32/COM apis that are available for Metro apps to use:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br205757(v=VS….).aspx
(OSAlert doesn’t parse the URL properly.
The last part of the URL is “br205757(v=VS.85).aspx”.)
Also, the full Win32 will be available for classic Desktop apps, and I don’t see that going away for a long time.
As for ARM, Windows 8 isn’t supporting the classic desktop for ARM, so I’d agree that Win32 is likely dead there (though it never lived there to begin with).
Edited 2011-09-15 19:49 UTC
Ok, you are right that there is a subset of calls your allowed to make (which Microsoft admitted is stuff they just don’t have time to port over).
However that is a tiny subset of functionality and it’s almost very specific COM stuff.
Can we agree that WinRT is the future and Win32 is the past, to be phased out over a (probably long) period?
Cut down version of Win32 was the api of WinCE so yes it had lived in arm space for at least 15 years.
Supporting that would privide some migration path for all those WinCE devs that MS had screwed royally with annuncement of WP7.
I’m not surprised that MS dumps Flash, what do they care? But to move away from their lock-in-ish Silverlight to open standards is very not Microsoft like. And I’m glad they are doing it, it’ll benefit the Web (let’s see if they’ll start supporting WebM as well).
Would be great if they’d do the same thing for OpenGL, but I doubt it could happen, since DirectX penetration is way deeper than Silverlight’s.
Edited 2011-09-15 17:09 UTC
OpenGL sucks. Why abandon DirectX, which is both superior and more widely used, for OpenGL garbage? What, just because OpenGL is some sort of “standard”? There are lots of standards that suck, and OpenGL is one of ’em.
It “sucks” as far as Microsoft distracted vendors to work on DirectX instead. In fact OpenGL doesn’t suck. But some drivers from vendors – do.
DirectX is not superior to OpenGL. But Microsfot’s domination causes it to be more supported [on Windows, it’s non existent elsewhere], that’s it. You aren’t forced to feed MS monopoly machine though.
Edited 2011-09-15 20:54 UTC
They won’t be supporting WebM.
They are one of the members of the organisation that created/owns H.264
It hardly matters if Microsoft don’t support webM, because WebM supports Windows and IE9+.
http://www.webmproject.org/code/#webm-repositories
From a website developers point of view, HTML5/WebM will have far, far wider support than HTML5/H264 ever will.
A user has to install this. Most user don’t know what DirectShow or a codec are, how or why to install it, etc.
Consequently, for most people, a site that only supported webm would be ‘broken’.
Realistically most sites will simply support both h264 and webm sources with h264 probably more prominent simply because browsers which don’t support it support flash players which can then play h264.
The first version of Android to support WebM was Gingerbread. It will be a while before Gingerbread or later is on most Android phones. With Google activating over 500,000 new Android devices each day, this won’t take all that long.
When that happens, Google may at that point direct YouTube to “throw the big switch” and change over to primarily WebM, with Flash fallback still supported for a while. YouTube will point out that after all, Microsoft is dropping support for Flash, so YouTube should as well.
People visiting the YouTube site using IE9+ and Windows, or Mac OSX and Safari, will be given a link via which they can simply install WebM. It will be only a small download, less trouble that installing Flash was in the first place.
If a user could install a Flash plugin some time ago in order to see YouTube, that same user should find it easier, or at least no harder, to install a WebM codec package in a similar way.
People visiting the YouTube site using IE6,IE7 or IE8 will be advised that their browser does not support HTML5 video natively, and although they will still be able to use YouTube for a while, they might be better off with Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera. They too will be offered a link.
People already using anything other than IE or Safari on any platform will, of course, have no trouble whatsoever. This is over half the people anyway.
Edited 2011-09-16 07:14 UTC
Somehow I began to feel even worse for Adobe after reading that… could you imagine how’d they feel just when they thought Google would support them by bundling in Flash with Chrome?
If Apple and Microsoft hammered in the nails to the Flash coffin by not supporting it in their tablet OSes, Google dropping Flash support on YouTube would be the part where they put on the epitaph.
Adobe had their chance to improve performance of Flash. They didn’t, intentionally put much resource into it. Now they pay the price. May be open sourcing Flash can prolong its usage.
You Tube streams H264 as well.
For now. Google may as well, since it keeps a H264 for the sake of Flash. However the ultimate objective for Google is to not require a H264 copy, in order to: save on storage (YouTube has literally millions of videos); to avoid any control that the MPEG LA consortium has over Google/YouTube’s continued ability to conduct business; for all buisness to be able to run Internet video clip ads without having to pay MPEG LA for the ability to do so; and finally perhaps for YouTube to be able to show community-source video yet save on license fees paid to the MPEG LA consortium and hence to competitors.
What is the point of trying to run a competitive business if your competitors have the ability to stop you running it at their whim, and they also have the ability to profit from your running it?
Edited 2011-09-18 23:13 UTC
As a web dev it actually easier just to say
“MP4 for iPads and IE9, and everything else can have flash”.
I spoken with a few other web devs and they have told me they have done it exactly the same.
Also means I don’t have to encode the same video 3 times. Only Twice … saves disk space, and the crunching server has to do less.
How about “MP4 for iPads and IE9, and everything else can have WebM”. You can then use essentially the same HTML5 streaming software, just pointed at a different source video file in each case.
For the cost of a few cents of disk space and a minute or so to re-encode the video, you will avoid thoroughly pissing off over half of your visitors, by giving them a HTML5/WebM video stream which their browser can render directly, and thereby not requiring them to run Flash.
Since these visitors wanting HTML5/WebM for their Chrome, Firefox or Opera browsers are the actual majority of users, shouldn’t you be catering to them first?
If you really wanted desperately to save the pennies worth of disk space, then to cater for the remaining minority of your visitors, wouldn’t it be much easier to provide a link to an installable WebM codec for them to use? Then they would be better off as well as you.
Edited 2011-09-17 05:52 UTC
WebM does not work with IE7 & IE8 and most of our users view the site in those browsers and that is what we support internally. As the vast majority of our visitors have flash installed (95%).
Many of our Firefox visitors are still on Firefox 3.6.
I am not pissing off any of our visitors … I have ensured that 99.9% of our visitors can view videos. I don’t care about people like Kroc that refuses to install flash.
We had 2 visitors last month browsing the site using Linux.
The majority of our users are IE7/IE8/IE9, we get about 6000 visitors a day. Even if the majority were Chrome, Firefox or Opera (we had a few hundred Opera users, I don’t even bother supporting those), all those browsers support flash in Windows and MacOSX.
Oh Comon. It is not like we can stick an off the shelf Terabyte drive into a SAS/NAS at the hosting company. I forgot the details (since I am not a server admin), but it isn’t cheap to get the hosting company to buy and fit the disks. We aren’t talking hundreds we are talking thousands of pounds.
Most people have flash installed, There are such a small percentage of people that visit the site and do not have flash installed on regular Computers, it doesn’t matter. We have thousands of uniques per day.
Edited 2011-09-17 11:54 UTC
“The only downside to not having Flash is that most of the ads on the web are/were in Flash, so if you ran a Flashblock extension, that pretty much zapped a lot of them at once.”
I had not thought of that… Good point!
I use the Click-To-Flash blocker and the internet is a much better experience.
To my knowledge, Flash has never been included in any version of Windows. I don’t see how it not being included in Windows 8 is such a big deal.
The chief architect of Windows is saying ‘don’t use Flash, we don’t support it in Metro’ (joining that other Steve guy from the fruit company) and you don’t think that’s news?
He’s not saying that there will be no Flash support whatsoever when browsing the web in Win8. He’s simply saying that when you write Metro apps, you use HTML5 and not Flash, which is nothing big. When writing Windows 7 apps, you didn’t use Flash either, did you?
Flash works in Windows 8, just as it did in any version of Windows prior. The iOS story was different because Flash doesn’t work on iOS, whatsoever.
But I guess Adobe and Flash are now what Microsoft and Windows used to be: the company and the product everyone uses and everyone loves to hate, for whatever reason they can find.
Edited 2011-09-15 18:10 UTC
Are you reading the same blog post? He said …
He then goes on to say …
So a user is going to need to first install Flash (it won’t auto install anymore) and then the user will need to switch to ‘Desktop View’ on the Metro UI. How many people are really going to do that?
Flash is dead dude; get over it.
According to who? Microsoft, oh please, lol
The blessing and legacy of the Smartphone market is that people have learned that you don’t need Microsoft for your Internet needs. Right now Windows phones have one of the smallest market shares in that industry.
If Microsoft try to push too hard in that Non compatible line on the Internet, they will get a lot of angry users that many of them will jump somewhere else (Mac, Android) and not come back. And yes, Android is working to eventually hit the desktop. Where do you think all those million facebook users gonna run when they found out that Windows don’t work with their Facebook games?
Advertising Silverlight and Metro UI is nothing new to MS. They only support their own stuff anyway. The only problem is that the market is moving toward open standards, like HTML5 over Flash, multiplatform solutions like Android. Even you see development tools like Delphi and Qt toolkit supporting at least Mac/Windows. If they don’t open (and mean really open) their technologies like Net.Framework and start working towards multiplatform solutions not only Windows, but all their software stack will go down eventually.
“Advertising Silverlight”? Did you bother to read the article? Neither Flash, nor Silverlight, nor Java, nor any plugin will be supported in the Metro verison of IE 10. The Desktop version of IE 10 will support plugins just as IE9 does.
Where do you get “Advertising Silverlight” from?
Oh, and no, Flash isn’t dead because Microsoft says so. It’d dying (not dead yet) because Apple and Microsoft say so, and Google is about to say so too when they flip the big switch at YouTube and make it an HTML5 only site.
Wait, did you actually tout Delphi? LOLOLOLOL
Delphi is deader than dead.
Edited 2011-09-15 19:58 UTC
Hey now, back in the day (90’s) when I actually programmed on Windows Delphi was good. I guess it’s pretty dead these days though. Shame that, Borland always made better products.
It’s a shadow of the former glory, but still around. They have a new UI framework and plan to support Mac and iOS using a version of FreePascal. Odd. Embarcadero never did let the grass grow…..
So wait, your saying that the champion of Flash is who now?
The only platform that now officially supports Flash on Mobile is Android. You think that Google is going to be the savior of Flash?
(Personally I think Google will kill flash as of 3.1 because why worry about a quasi secure battery hungry technology if it’s no longer strategic).
I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know if what I’m saying is right. But I’d like to share this thought to learn more about the situation.
Consider Facebook applications like Farmville. They are extremely popular and are written with Flash. And I don’t see how they could be written without it. As far as I know, fetching Javascript from a remote server and blindly letting it do whatever it wants is a very bad idea. With Flash, the application is sandboxed, and thus, it would be harder to compromise a system this way, and developers with genuine goals won’t need to go through a daunting bureaucratic process for approving their application.
Am I missing something, or will there always be a little place for Flash?
( Again, I don’t want to start a HTML 5 versus Flash debate, I just want to know this since I’m working on a little project and I’d like to know whether the ( short term ) future is Flash or HTML 5 for applications. )
Farmville could be done with JS and HTML these days. Not as simply or easily as with Flash, but it could be done as securely. The missing pieces today will soon be filled by WebSockets and the JS audio API. When you can sync visuals to sounds there’ll be little reason to use flash for games.
Flash is still going to be ‘better’ at it for a while–you don’t replace something so mature quickly, not with any degree of perfection.
Javascript is even more “sandboxed” than any browser plugin, since it is even more limited and controlled than any plugin. And it shows, the worst security holes for your desktop have always come from plugins, not Javascript.
About Flash future, such widely used runtimes as Flash usually take very long to die; Visual Basic was deprecated nearly a decade ago, and it is still fully supported by Windows, because of the thousands of internal apps in use out there. Anyway, I don’t recommend investing heavily in a dying platform, it can be very painful in the long term. Is Flash one of them? I don’t think anyone really knows. I think the most probable way for Flash to die is by Adobe making a HTML5 compiler for Flash source files. It would be a good move, because it will keep developers using Adobe IDEs, which is their real source of Flash income. Will they do? Who knows…
About Windows 8: everytime Microsoft launches a new version of Windows we get thousands of people ranting everywhere about dropped features, DRM, and other nonsense. Everytime, all of these babble is utterly wrong.
Microsoft revenue is heavily dependent on enterprise. Nowadays the money in enterprise software is not on licenses at all, it is in support, training and certification. That’s the main reason of the success of most of the open source companies. They will never do anything that breaks their stronghold there. A clear example is IE6: maintaining it was a real pain in the ass, it was totally outdated, giving them bad press, but many of their enterprise clients have very expensive internal aplications based on it, so they kept it for years, until their clients got ridden of their legacy apps or virtualized them (Citrix has helped a lot).
I have just tried the Developer Preview of Windows 8, and, as far as I can see, it is an alpha of the combination Windows 7 plus Metro. It lacks some things, but most of them don’t really make sense in a developer preview and surely will be added later (extreme example: can’t find minesweeper). Changing between Metro and the classic desktop is as simple as pressing the Windows logo on your keyboard. If you only use classic windows apps, you will only see Metro on logon, logout and when you try to use the Start Menu, all of these are only on Metro.
Anyway, most of the new interface seems to be very bare bones. Most eggregious example is probably the shitty new Start button; I don’t think it is going to remain untouched very long.
I wrote a site in HTML5, people called me stupid for using an unfinished spec not supported by IE.
Microsoft added HTML5 support in IE9 and are now fully behind it as part of their desktop strategy. Every up to date major browser exudes HTML5 support.
I uninstalled Flash and lived without it. People called me stupid since Flash is necessary for the web.
iOS, Mac OS and soon Windows will not ship with either/or use Flash.
I developed an HTML5 video player early on. People called me stupid since Flash is necessary for video, browsers didn^aEURTMt support it, OGG wasn^aEURTMt good enough and H.264 was proprietary. Now more browsers than not ship with HTML5 video and Webm.
If you did not see this coming from Microsoft, you didn^aEURTMt have your eyes on the ^aEURTMWeb.
Gaming is the next big thing moving to the ^aEURTMWeb. I was writing HTML5 game engines back with Firefox 3.0 beta. Now there are hundreds of engines, Facebook is experimenting with HTML5 gaming and numerous demo contests have arisen.
Don^aEURTMt be surprised if HTML5 gaming dominates the casual market.
Oh, so Facebook applications can be written in HTML 5. That’s pretty cool.
I am still curious though, Kroc, how do you manage for example, polling for keyboard events and sound in a HTML5-based game engine?
Microsoft will choke on WebGL (they already did) since they always considered OpenGL their rival. So far their support of HTML5 is far from perfect.
Don’t be fooled in to believing Metro is “just HTML5”. It’s not. HTML5 is just one option.
I didn’t know you were working on HTML games. This is also an area of interest for me. Got linkage?
“I do think Adobe has had enough time to make Flash work properly on mobile, and they simply failed.”
s/mobile/desktop/g
Thom, Flash failed to meet expectations but Flash is being rooted out by corporate forces, not by users’ choice. They still love casual gaming and that’s not bound to change.
Whether you like Flash or hate it, this probably will be a final true test. If Flash survives because the users will work around artificial obstacles, it will only get stronger.
Take something away from a man, and he’ll want it even more. That’s psychology 101.
ps. I hate how flash is slow, but I love the games, I won’t lie about that
I’m a bit confused here – has Flash (or Silverlight for that matter) ever actually shipped with Windows? Maybe some OEM installs put it in, but I think the retail versions of Windows haven’t had as far as I know. Perhaps the change here is that MS is actively discouraging OEMs from pre-installing Flash – it’s not very clear to me at all.
There’s probably nothing stopping Adobe releasing Flash for Windows 8 (maybe the current Flash works with Windows 8 already?), but I presume that any Microsoft products for Windows 8 will not use Flash (again, the question is how many current MS products come with specific Flash support [other than generic plug-in support in IE of course]? Probably close to zero).
It would be useful if MS clarified their position on Flash further, particularly w.r.t. OEM Windows installs and MS apps. I can’t see IE 10 dropping the ability to install a Flash plugin for example, because then no plugins would be installable in IE 10 at all!
How you can conclude that because the Windows front end won’t support anything but HTML5 that any other technology is dead is ludicrous. You don’t browse the web from the front end, you use it to get to where you’re going.
It’s important to keep the front end clean. It’s important to keep it functioning properly. That’s why it’s now standard HTML5.
All the browsers will continue to use flash, it’s not going the way of the Dodo any time soon.