So Alessandrini put out a challenge on Twitter:
All those who think no flash on ipad is A-OK please uninstall flash from your current browser, use that for a month then get back to me.
So I’ve gone halfsies and installed FlashBlock for Chrome, which forces me to click whenever I need to see something Flash-based, and I’ll use this entry to report, as the month goes by, what things I would have been unable to do or see due to the lack of Flash. This isn’t meant to prove that everyone will do fine without Flash, nor even that I will. Rather, it will highlight issues to overcome in the near future as well as tell me and you something about my internet habits in relation to Flash.
Or in other words: I walk the walk, but do I talk the talk?
Now, let me say however, that I undoubtedly will run into problems as there are some sites that straight up need Flash to work. I fully expect this, and I would expect the same for the iPad. However I also strongly believe that the lack of Flash on the iPad will lead sites to either ditch Flash entirely, or at least provide both a Flash and a proper solution, downgrading either way, depending on your point of view. This is a good thing in the long run. Yes, it’s a shame that the internet seems to be in a constant period of transition pain — if it isn’t one thing, it’s another — but that’s no excuse to be lazy. Flash is a nightmare in stability, performance and usability; I’m happy to see it go (as I have explained at length in a previous post).
I’ve started by switching both YouTube (read here) and Vimeo (read here) to HTML5, and they’re both working great, though YouTube seemingly doesn’t allow for choosing quality (Vimeo does). I’ll chalk that up to implementation or backend rather than an HTML5 shortcoming. I asked Colin about Viddler, which is on its way (though it is early).
YouTube already works fine on the iPhone with the native app, and Vimeo already switches to h.264, and I expect they’ll do the same on the iPad.
I will update this post with new findings and update on my Twitter account (with the #flashfreefeb tag).
Problem Log:
February 2nd: Embedded videos from YouTube and Vimeo are always Flash, which means you have to go to the site to watch them. YouTube doesn’t copy over and accompanying HTML when embedding, which leaves users with no easy way to go to YouTube’s own site to watch them in HTML5. Double doh. This wouldn’t be a problem for YouTube on the iPad however, as it would switch to the YouTube app for playback. Vimeo on the other hand includes HTML by default, but it can be deselected (or manually deleted), and that leaves you with no option to easily watch the movie.
Here, by the way, is a brilliant example of why Flash needs to be shot out of an airlock. On Vimeo’s site, they’ve made their own Flash-based scrollbar. Why? Who knows. Yes, it’s the designer who needs a good beating, but Flash is the enabler of this kind of unnecessary silliness, which a) should be left alone or b) done in JS/CSS:
February 3rd: Google Analytics uses Flash to display most of (but not all) the various graphs it uses, which is silly; they would be just as good and interactive if they had used web standards. So I’m using my Mint installation instead for the time being; the loss in functionality? None.
Huffduffer’s inline audio player is Flash; I’m not sure what the advantages are, I’m sure there are some (Jeremy can no doubt fill me in), probably supports a wider range of formats or something like that. Or it’s easier to make work across all browsers in one fell stroke. Seems like that should be mostly doable with web standards as is however.
YouTube doesn’t allow for fullscreen, or even filling up the browser window with a video. To my knowledge you can’t go entirely fullscreen using current browsers (Webkit nightly excluded. As usual Webkit is where it’s at), but at least they can fill up the browser window quite easily, like Sublime does it.
And while Vimeo does have HTML5 support, they haven’t implemented it extensively enough yet, making it impossible to use Staff Picks for instance.
February 4th: A friend sent me a link for an Australian military tattoo site made in Flash.
A link for the music video for Massive Attacks song Splitting the Atom came through my feeds today; the embedded video was Flash; I hopped over to YouTube and watched it in HTML5 instead. HTML5 video playback on Chrome on OS X is however still not as nice as Flash’s.
February 6th: Engadget loads some odd little Flash thingie that isn’t supposed to be seen by anyone (it points back to Clearspring does the same by the way), which leads me to believe it could be done just as easily without Flash. Oh and then there’s an ad.
Also the Fallout: New Vegas teaser trailer site is in Flash.
February 8th: CopyPasteCharacter uses flash. Doh. I love that site.
Got sent a link to a flash-based scratch game. It’s quite fun (well, more novel than fun if I do have to nitpick), nothing I’ll miss though.
February 9th: Bit.ly uses Flash for it’s ‘copy to clipboard’ button. As far as I know there is no cross-browser solution to this, which by the way is the same problem as on CopyPasteCharacter. There are however fairly simply solutions that require the user to only press CMD-C/CTRL-C, which in my opinion is good enough.
February 10th: Flickr’s web uploader (or is it uploadr?) is Flash-based. Gmail’s isn’t as far as I can see, and works just as well.
February 12th: The Danish National Radio broadcasts a 2-hour concert with the Danish band Kashmir live on their site using Flash.
Why is it that despite missing 30 – 40% of Politikens above-the-fold page, I don’t feel like I’m missing out?
February 13th: I went to download the first track from the upcoming UNKLE album “Where did the night fall”, and had to put in my mail address in a Flash field to get a download link. Nevermind that I don’t get why this is needed, but for a mail form to be Flash… This is what you get when lazy Flash developers are set free on the world. The rest of the site is in Flash as well; for no apparent reason, other than to make it slow and unresponsive, it would seem.
February 23rd: Wow, been a while. Haven’t used Flash for anything but embedded videos in the last ten days. But right now I’m watching the MacBreak Weekly live recording stream.
Febeuary 25th: Wasn’t able to play Unicorn Robot Attack. Dammit.
I couldn’t see your example images as i had imgs turned off. ;)
Great plan. Would love to see the results of this test. Very insightful already.
That Vimeo scrollbar is ridiculous and has bothered me forever.
I’d love to hear why it even exists. Time to knock on their door.
Excellent challenge! If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m superbly busy these days, I’d join you.
Because as I’m superbly busy, I need the “select multiple files” Flash uploader in Gmail.
The poin of this comment is not that I’m a Flash fan, you know that I’m not. The point is, Flash is on they way out as HTML5 is on the way in; HTML5 is not here yet.
There’s a downside here. Some sites that are flash on PC, like the NBC site, use MP4 files on the iPhone. If I were to try to watch 30 rock, for example, on my mac, it’d load in flash. I’ve also watched 30 rock from the NBC site for iPhone, and it loaded in four mp4 files. That is to say, while it would seem it wouldn’t work on the iPad because your browser would say “I’m a full fledged computer” so the site would give it flash, but on the iPad itself they’d hand it the mobile version which would work fine without flash.
Also, porn on the iPhone doesn’t require flash either. Brazzers has a mobile site, as well as iPinkVisual and PornHub. All work fine on the iPhone. I believe BangBus may as well, but I have not confirmed this. That was my issue with TheFlashBlog saying porn wouldn’t work… it already does.
Um, that was some dedicated research right there, Tom.
Thanks for your hard work!
Hard work indeed.
The porn industry is always the first to adopt new media. Or so I’M TOLD!
I’m definitely intersted to see your results too. While I’m definitely not in the “shoot it out of an airlock camp”, I see a lot of examples of flash where there could be javascript.
To pose a counterpoint though, there are plenty of examples where flash is a good fit. While nobody would disagree that Flash is the wrong tool for making a scroller, the vast majority of browser-based flash-games do things that just aren’t possible with HTML & Javascript.
IIRC Huffduffer uses Flash because of an issue with Safari’s implementation of the audio element. I think it auto-buffers everything, which means an awful lot of bandwidth if you’ve got a lot of MP3s on a page.
Ive reinistalled ClickToFlash back in my Safari.
Difficult Challenge. Unfortunately I have to use Flash sometimes.
But I will try not to click on the ClickToFlash-Button!
It shouldn’t be that hard to cobble together a userscript to put a link to the youtube page for each embedded video on a page. Anyone want to take a stab at it, or should I?
Vimeo Staff, regarding the flash scrollbar:
“at the time it was a measure we used to get the thumbnail positioning and dynamic content loading in the most precise and economical fashion from development standpoint. we are considering redoing it without the use of flash in the next iteration. “
http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:21640
(no HTML comments? IMGs?)
The main reason why I’m using Flash rather than the audio element for Huffduffer (besides the fact that Firefox doesn’t support mp3 for audio) is Webkit’s aggressive pre-buffering, detailed here:
http://adactio.com/journal/1524/
It’s the same issue that John Gruber detailed with the video element:
http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/html5_video_unusable
And here’s the associated bug:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25267
But please note that the “download” link with every huffduffed item takes you straight to the audio file so you don’t need the little Flash player to hear the audio.
For what it’s worth, I thought I would try going fully flash free by uninstalling the flash plugin. Did that on Tuesday. So far there has been only one flash video I to watch, so I used my wife’s computer. I think this is a good experiment and look forward to seeing how it works for everyone.
Saw this, thought it was interesting, especially for all the Flash Player apologists:
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_content_and_app.html#comment-2137153
Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.
Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on — for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.
Also, there are variations depending on the browser as well as the OS — for example, on Windows, IE8 is able to run Flash about 20% faster than Firefox. On the Mac, Safari has the performance lead currently in terms of running Flash. Our experience overall has been that people will create content to make more use of processing power as it has increased over time (similar to how you never seem to have enough hard disk space even as disk size increases). I have asked the Flash engineering team to publish performance metrics across operating systems and browsers so the details can be better understood, and these should be available shortly.
Michael, i cant believe you’re so focused on the iPad that you didn’t even bother to play Mass Effect 2! Shame on you.
Playing it now; I’m about to leave Illium. Scarce time these days though.
Whether you hate flash or love it or don’t care. The thing is that the iPad is supposed to be a great way to see the internet. I just can’t understand then why does apple not let us see everything? The switch to HTML5 will be slow and even then you’ll have legacy files and web pages that are still in flash for years to come. Instead of trying to live without flash I think everyone should demand that Apple gives us what they promised 3 years ago with the iPhone: “not the baby internet but the whole internet”.
@Marc: So Flash + HTML is everything? Huh? There are thousands of plug-ins on the web. You have to draw the line somewhere and I think drawing it on the side of open technologies is spot on.
Dropbox’s uploader is flash-based too.
Hi, I’m a student of web design and development. My last two classes were based on Adobe Flash. I had NO idea that people were unhappy with it! I planned on becoming a Flash developer. Other than telling me NOT to become that, is there another tool that is similar that works better? I’m not stuck on any type of scripting or development tools at this point, I’m a beginner and a learner… Thanks!
I always think one of the the main problems with Flash is it gives designers (print based) the opportunity to project work into the web without really understanding the web itself…. ALA spending ages making a pointless Scrollbar! or my pet hate: using print fonts at 10px so they render horribly – Yuuuck….
@Joyce
I wouldn’t go searching for a new career just yet. When considering using Flash keep a few things in mind:
#1. HTML5 is not a standard yet is likely at least another year before the standard is accepted. Even after that, it will take some time to get users up to speed.
#2. HTML5 can handle video and do some graphical things via canvas, it is still not as robust as Flash for graphics or as robust for video as Silverlight.
#3. Making games or applications in Flash is just fine. Most of the issues with Flash are when it is used for things that could be done with standards compliant technologies, such as navigation. In these cases, you should either avoid Flash or provide a non-Flash alternative.
#4. Finally, while there is a very vocal anti-Flash minority, it is still more wide-spread than any currently accepted standards-based technology. In a perfect world, 100% web standards compliance would be great, but in the real world a 90%+ install base is pretty tough to argue against.