One of the biggest stories in this year is the battle between Flash and HTML5 over who will remain supreme for video and web apps. With over 85% of total websites using Flash, Flash is still dominating with a very strong community. However, HTML5 is getting the momentum, with over half of online video now available in HTML5 format. We have been seeing lot of powerful web sites powered by HTML5 like Google Docs and Youtube. Even Adobe has released its own converter from Flash to HTML5. It is worth noting that HTML5 is being adopted like crazy at this time.
Top sites like Youtube, Justin.tv, Ustream, Veoh etc runs on Flash. Maybe one of the reason is not all browsers support HTML5 but Flash is supported by almost every browser(even if it requires installing third party plugins). HTML5 supports video using <video> tag. Its defined as the easiest method to embed a video on web pages. Just include <video src = “myfile.avi”></video> and you ‘re done.
Flash has been the most used platform for online games. Some of the examples are Zynga’s games, Miniclip and flash arcade. Actionscript has evolved into a full featured language and it’s a most powerful language for online gaming. But we are seeing massive improvements on HTML5 games with Javascript Core and <canvas> element.
Why use HTML5?
Ease: HTML5 is HTML4/XHTML with less than 50+ tags. It certainly has new techniques but its the same HTML language which we are using it from decades. By Flash, we need to learn different and complex Actionscript language.
Cost: To develop applications and animation on Flash platform, we need to purchase various softwares like Adobe Flash or Flex. You can save this cost by moving to HTML5. HTML5 is an open source development and as always, there will be huge community support to help each other.
Stability: Since HTML5 is handled by browser vendors not third party plug-ins, they don’t need to rely on Adobe to fix the bugs. We have heard of lot of flash performance and stability issues with Mac, Linux and even Windows. With HTML5, it will be lot easier for browser vendors to fix these.
Integration: Flash runs on top of the browser not with the browser. HTML5 integrates with CSS, SVG and Javascript meaning you can control the browser. You can open tabs, find and control other browser function which is impossible with Flash.
Portability: HTML5 can be ported to any platform without permission from Adobe. You don’t need to worry about whether the video works on certain devices or not. After it is standard, it will be cross-platform across all computers, tablets and mobile devices.
Flash still leads with many more features like microphones and web cam support. high definition video and animation etc. However, HTML5 is still amateur and will take a while to give us all the features and functionality of Flash. It will take some time for it to be mature and be available to compete with Flash with hardware acceleration, speed and portability.