Stephen Caver

Developers who supplement Flash with HTML5 may soon tire of Flash—but Adobe has a brief but golden opportunity to create the tools with which rich HTML5 content is created. Let’s see if they figure that out.

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—	Jeffrey Zeldman on Flash, iPad and Standards.

What is news is that the Rubicon has been reached and the die, as it were, has been cast by Apple. The sum of these technologies and their future promise is enough to provide a real alternative to Flash for the first time ever.

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—	Nathan Peretic on The Withering Away of Flash.

SublimeVideo HTML5 Video Player »

It sure has Flash beat, that’s for sure. Safari only for now.

Ahem »

Zeldman clarifies his position on Flash, HTML5. Just in case you didn’t get it the first time around.

BashFlash »

BashFlash monitors how many processor cycles Flash is using and allows you to kill the Flash plug-in if necessary.

New Flash content designed just for touchscreens can be done, but people want existing Flash sites to work. All of them—not just some here and there—and in a usable manner. That’s impossible no matter what.

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—	Daniel Eran Dilger on why the iPad can’t use Flash.

FSF: Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube »

It seems more and more like we are fast approaching the death of Flash as the de-facto standard for playing video on the web.

Virgin America drops Flash from its website. »

The trend seems to be pretty clear to me.

ReadWriteWeb: Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests »

The results aren’t as surprising as the headline claims (Flash is faster in Windows than on Mac OS X and this is because it has access to hardware acceleration.

Apple’s reason for not allowing access to hardware acceleration is mysterious, of course. And the conspiracy theory is they are doing it purposefully to block Flash on OS X. Could be. But we don’t know.

Daring Fireball: Microsoft Promises HTML5 Video Support in IE9 »

Flash for video is definitely on the way out.

Though Flash may have been necessary in the past to provide functionality in the browser that wasn’t possible using JS, HTML, and CSS, that is no longer the case. Those open web technologies have matured (or will in the near future) and can do most or even all of what is possible with Flash.

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—	Jason Kottke

IE9 to Support H.264 Only »

I think a wise choice. Also note Dean Hachamovitch’s comments regarding flash:

Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

Flash will be with us on the desktop for quite awhile. Its prospects on mobile are much more murky.