Terry's Blog: HTML5 VS Flash

HTML5 has been out for several years. The design of this public standard is to provide more advanced functions like flexible canvas, video support and browser database. The standard aims to provide better web experience without the use of proprietary software like Flash. In this year, Apple refuses to support Flash in their Iphone OS. According to Apple, the reasons for this decision are problems in battery life, security and performance [1]. Instead of using Flash, Apple has chosen open standard like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Can HTML5 replace Flash in the future? Let’s look at the advantages of both technologies.

HTML5, as stated before, aims to provide better web experience and support more on graphics and video which was mostly supported by Flash in the internet. While it provides some common feature that Flash has offered, it also has other advantages over Flash. The advantages are open standard, high performance and favorable for mobile devices.

Unlike Flash, HTML5 is a truly open standard which can be freely used by any browsers or parties and it is supported by a many companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. This means that it will be available in nearly all browsers and platforms in the future without installing any plugins. This is a huge advantage over Flash which has limited supports in platforms other than desktop OS and requires plugins installation. After all, not all people know how to install a plugin and that’s why Internet Explorer is still the dominating browser. Also, compared to Flash, it doesn’t require developers to buy any tools and there will be likely free open-source tools for development of HTML5. Therefore, being open will gives HTML5 more users and saves development cost.

Performance is one of the weak spot of Flash. However, according to the test made by readwriteweb [2], the perofrmance difference between HTML5 and Flash is not that huge in Windows. However, when it comes to Mac and Linux, HTML5 generally provide better performance because Flash doesn’t support hardware acceleration in these platforms. This may make the users of Mac and Linux prefer HTML5 over Flash.

HTML5 is more favorable for mobile devices than Flash. Flash is only supported in a few mobile devices and doesn’t support hardware acceleration. Also, Flash in mobile phone may drain battery fast. The overall user experience is not good. On the other hand, HTML5 is supported by Saferi, Opera and default Android browser and doesn’t have above problems. Also, most Flash sites are not designed for mobile phone and don’t fit the screen size of them. This is not an issue for HTML5 as mobile phone browser optimized to present its content in a different way which is more suitable for mobile phone. HTML5 is better for mobile phone as it doesn’t drain much battery and have better user experience.

So far, we have seen the advantages of HTML5. It is the time to see the advantages of Flash. Flash is more robust and have a lot of website using it as a working solution.

Flash is more robust than HTML5 because it is designed as a multimedia framework and HTML5 is designed as a presentation language. This means that Flash is designed to support any formatted multimedia applications and can be used to develop complex games without spending too much effort. HTML5 is in fact still a language for presenting information on a page. Although HTML5 still can be used to create interactive web application, the effort for doing this is larger than using Flash. Designers can create animation and simple games in Flash without coding. This let designers to concentrate on more high level design. HTML5 may have similar tools in the future. However, now Flash is better than HTML5 in development.

There are a lot of websites using Flash for its multimedia content presentation. There is no point for them to change their platform to HTML5 because Flash is proven as a working solution for them and changing platforms means extra cost. On the other hand, a lot of designers and developers are used to Flash. They will not change their platform easily as both HTML5 and Flash offers similar functions in many aspects and Flash has even better development advantages. Therefore, those website and developers will insists on their old preference and continue to use Flash.

We have seen a lot of advantages that both technologies have. To sum up, HTML5 has better support for almost every platform and will provide better overall user experience in mobile platforms. Flash provides better functions and development tools for designers and developers. Also, it is used by a lot of websites and is proven as a working solution. Can HTML5 replace Flash? Although HTML5 provides a lot of advantages that flash don’t have, Flash still is the most popular platforms for interactive multimedia web applications. This is not changed easily. In my opinion, both HTML5 and Flash will coexists in the internet and internet is large enough for both of them working together.