The Browser Wars Return - Flash Under Attack
Francis Turner
August 20th, 2009
One of the undoubted benefits of Google’s entry into the web-browser world with Chrome is that it has helped light a fire under the other broswer providers. Google’s reason for entering the browser wars was that it needed a better javascript engine to run the sorts of javascript heavy pages that its online applications use since javascript performance was frequently less than stellar.
This has had an effect with most major browser providers increasing the speed of their offering (interestingly while earlier tests had Chrome fastest, in a recent benchmark Apple’s Safari betas seemed to be slightly faster that Chrome) but it isn’t the only way that Google has influenced the browser wars. The other thing Google has done is given a kick in the pants to a number of HTML 5 features that might otherwise have languished.
Interestingly one of those features - downloadable fonts - is not yet supported by Chrome (though it is supported by Opera’s v10 beta and Firefox 3.5 (and supported differently by IE 8)). A couple of other features - the video and audio tags - are only available in the Chrome 3.0 alphas. While downloadable fonts are probably not that exciting - though this page explains why designers should cheer - the video and audio tags clearly have a major potential hit on Adobe because it pretty much removes one of the main drivers for flash. This recent Cringely column points out a related attack on flash via the codecs used and should probably be read as well.
Indeed the combination of downloadable fonts, javascript to download XML etc. and these tags mean that flash becomes almost entirely superfluous for web site creators. If web viewers don’t need flash for video or audio and web creators utilize HTML 5 to make flash like page effects natively in the browser then flash loses its status as a default plugin that all browsers have. Amusingly this may end up helping Microsoft because it potentially allows Silverlight to compete on a more level platform. On the other hand it is extremely unclear to me what benefits Silverlight will bring to the table that the same combination of natively supported browser features cannot also deliver.
The problem here, for both Adobe and Microsoft is that their proprietary development environments now look less like a basic requirement for a full service deb design house and more like an optional extra. It will be truly fascinating to see whether or not sales of Flash and Silverlight development tools drop.
On the other hand Adobe’s AIR potentially allows non browser based applications and applets to use the same AJAX and flash technologies that are used in web pages. The question then becomes whether users prefer to have 101 browser tabs/windows or 101 separate applets?