The number of things you can't do with HTML and Javascript is getting smaller every day. I see no need at all for flash in the long term. The only time I like flash is flash video players, but those will be replaceable in the future as well.
I actually think Flash is not entirely bad, it just does not really belong in browsers. As self-contained apps, Flash applications are pretty cool - they are fun and easy to program (at least AS3 - AS2 sucks), and I often use it as tool for rapid-prototyping little algorithms. Trying to put Flash into browsers though is like putting a sandbox inside another sandbox - it just gets in the way and impossible to effectively interface the two.
Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build processes and version control. I, and many others, were doing "real" programming on the Flash platform and felt totally understood as a developer by Adobe.
I'm not going to defend Flash's continued relevance on the web because like most people I think it's had its day but from about 2003 to 2010 the Flash developer community was massive and thriving, people were doing serious programming and Adobe was doing a pretty good job of understanding them and supporting them. It's this wealth of experience that I hope Adobe brings to bear on its HTML5 developer tools.
I feel like the relevance of Flash (and Adobe) is really quite poorly understood. A lot of the expertise and good practises from the more serious elements of the Flash community flooded into the JavaScript community and I feel this is one of the reasons JavaScript has developed so quickly. What's more, a lot of the "web2.0" style dynamic and interactive elements of websites that we take for granted now are watered down (and much better) versions of ideas that were conceived during those frenzied years of UI experimentation in the Flash community.
Granted those years of Flash threw up some UI abominations, but it was also a melting pot of ideas and creativity, the like of which we don't really see anymore, which is a shame in a way. Even though Flash was my livelihood I was happy to move on because I could see it was for the best, but if you ignore Flash your understanding of the last 10 years and the current context of web development is impoverished.
You know, before I tried Flash programming I would have agreed with you. But Flash has been painfully awkward every time I've tried it (for programming).
HTML5, if learned from good resources, using good tools, is much nicer for the programming side.
As someone who works with both Flash and HTML5, this news makes me sad.
Flash just works for much better. There are no cross-browser issues (except those that don't support it at all -- thanks, Apple). And ActionScript is a better language for building complex apps than JavaScript.
Flash exists because there is a gap in technological advancement between "standards" / open source and commercial software. This gap will exist forever. Because of this, Flash will also live forever.
HTML5+JS can render many Flash examples, yes. A streamlined IDE and a JS engine within the browser that runs AS FAST as a compiled SWF is yet to be seen.
Flash will continue to add features to keep it above the bare-minimum "standards" that so many web developers are used to developing on. Let's face it. We all clap for HTML5+JS, but who's actually using it with their clients; who fear nothing more than a visitor not being able to view a product or service?
Let's get real about Flash and agree it isn't A Good Thing for advancement and innovation if an idea farm (which receives millions and millions of dollars in R&D) like Flash is abandoned. Come on guys. Really?
HTML5 is cool but it's not the end-all. You have a whole set of new issues to deal with when you use HTML5. You have to worry about cross-browser compatibility and specific rendering bugs, whereas Flash authors don't. You have to rely on the slow JavaScript VMs included in even the fastest browsers (even the "fast" JS VMs are still rather slow), and then you have IE, which is still used by > 50% of internet users, of which much is IE 6 or 7, which are outdated and _extremely_ slow. You have audio synchronization issues. There is no ready-made IDE like Adobe's Flash IDE, meaning HTML5 development is much harder for many people. There are other issues too.
The fact is that HTML5 is not a reasonable general replacement for Flash. If you want your thing to work for most people, you are going to have to write in Flash anyway. Realistically, only a relative handful of people could run a HTML5/JavaScript program at Flash-equivalent speeds. And that assumes that you just want something in Flash that HTML5 could do; there's still RTMP and significant swaths of other stuff that Flash does and HTML5 doesn't.
I think that doesn't contribute to much. Flash, in a way, is also built on a set of smaller technologies and frameworks that vastly contribute to its popularity, and those are pretty independent. Look at, for example, tweening/easing libraries, which have been pretty popular in Flash for almost a decade and only started showing up in the JS side of things a while ago.
What will displace Flash is the lack of necessity for Flash, which is (or should be) obvious in 80% of what we see online. There are many things HTML do better, and easier, than Flash, and ignoring that is the real problem. People all of a sudden are trying to make HTML5 be like Flash, and failing at it, instead of remembering why Flash has never displaced HTML in the first place. I'm all of a sudden seeing a bunch of completely inane HTML5 websites that could have worked much better were they built with simple HTML technology, and it's infuriating to think we're back to the insanity of the Flash 5 time, where people would build stuff in Flash just because (something that today's Flash-based restaurant websites are an evolution of).
People need to remember that making snappy, simple, straight forward websites is totally a thing. That's what's gonna keep Flash at bay, in its little corner, as a technology best suited for lots of interactivity and media and embeds or whatever it is. Not trying to make all websites be Flash-like but just with an alternative but barely supported technology.
So lets compare the most important features that HTML5 might bring to what flash offers:
1. Faster Javascript Engines
AS3 in Flash Player 9 (2006) has about the same speed Javascript has now. There are about as many benchmarks showing AS3 beeing faster, then there are the ones showing Javascript beeing faster. Speed seems to be about the same
2. WebSockets
Has been in Flash since 2006
3. Binary Data Types (Typed Arrays and Blobs)
Has been in Flash since 2006
4. Web Audio API
Has been in Flash way longer
5. Canvas 2D Context
Has been in Flash since like forever ago
6. CSS3 and WOFF
Nothing really specific but Flash has most all of that since years
7. Local Storage, Offline Applications and the File APIs
Since 2006/2008
8. Web Workers
Will come with Flash 11.4 soon.
9. SVG 1.1/2.0
Vectors are at the core of Flash
10. WebGL
Stage3D is in Flash since 2011
So just stop hatin Flash and love the browser independent possibilities.
I think what the biggest problem is with HTML5 nowadays, is that even with HTML5/CSS3/JS every browser supports other parts of the standards and even if there are common elements they can behave differently. Everyone ever written a complex webpage for IE/FF/Safari on Windows and Mac will know what i mean: It's a nightmare. Flash offers a common API for all browsers and operating Systems and even more features then HTML5/CSS3 deliver with a feature rich platform for development.
Don't understand me wrong, i actually wish Flash to die. But i'd rather like it dead when programming for different browsers becomes less of a pain. Internet standards need to evolve faster (how long did it take for HTML5?) and browsers need to be more standard compliant/support a common feature set.
Also, as a sidenote, i wouldn't write websites in Flash, but i can see some actual benefits for the developer.
I don't know. I can write an application in flash and it will run on IE, chrome, Firefox, whatever. A lot of companies still use IE. I can also compile that down to run on ios, android, or blackberry (not that I'd want to). I can do all that from basically the same codebase with an ecma script language (as3) that I find much better for large scale projects than html5 (by which people actually mean js)
Flash is dying I guess, but it will be a long time until it actually dies, and that's good by me because html5/js still has a lot of catching up to do.
As an aside, I'm curious how many flash haters out there have actually written flash applications. Its really a good tool for a lot of applications, but the haters never really provide any specifics on what their problem is besides referencing poorly written apps that crash your browser, of which you'll find plenty of those in any language.
In my opinion, HTML5 and Flash have always served different audiences.
Flash got axed because the way it was implemented into clients was wasteful, insecure and a bad user experience in general. Same with Java; you can't make the same tools that Java applets once provided through the browser because of the browser's security model, so I'd say the two never competed.
Making a quick interactive animation that works across all kinds of resolutions and sizes was trivial in Flash, but in HTML5 this is a challenge. HTML5 and friends fixed the problems that made web developers grasp at Flash for, like file uploads, animations and predictable interaction with the mouse and keyboard. These features were often already possible in browsers, but Flash was the only tool that made them appear the same in every browser available. They didn't replace the flash scene for games, interactive simulations and other online experiences. The Flash game scene pretty much died when Flash started getting blocked by Chrome, with only a small subset of the community fragmenting and finding their way to frameworks like Unity Web and its then plentiful competitors with high learning curves because they were designed for the "real deal" game developers rather than self-taught animators that turned game dev.
I think JS is a necessity for the web to exist today, but we need an alternative for what once was Flash, Java, Shockwave and more. Too many features have been shoved into HTML and Javascript that have no business there, left to be abused by trackers and hackers alike.
My experience of HTML5 is that it blows Flash out of the water. Flash on Linux is (still) an absolute disaster while HTML5 is making progress every day and has long surpassed Flash in usefulness for most tasks.
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