Part of the problem is that the loudest voices are those who take sides – the vast majority of us out there are choosing tools on their suitability and reach.

In the mobile browser space HTML 5 currently has better reach than Flash, so is a more logical choice for certain types on app/content that have traditionally been done in Flash.

In the desktop browser space – well, you have to use Flash to render SVG content in Internet Explorer. Even if IE9 implements all the standards MS promise it will, it will still be years after that before we can stop supporting IE.

Flash Player 10.1 is going to a good step in the right direction with regards to increased performance. HTML5 still lacks a lot of functionality that Flash possess and has a mature set of development tools.

HTML5 will get there eventually, and then its up to the developer to choose which technology suites the situation.

Flash/Flex may not have been built for integrating with the latest JS libraries, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t. Check out the presentation I recently did for SeaFlexUG, showing how to use Flash/Flex for efficient push/long-poll communications for HTML applications

http://hat6.com/2009/12/09/using-flex-for-pushing-data-from-blazeds/

@Pavel
I find it difficult to believe that you could consider anything running in the browser to have ‘true power’. When you compare any browser-based performance to c++ performance, the difference between Unity3D and Flash is negligible. Also keep in mind that Unity has completely different optimizations than Flash does… Unity and other plugins suffer from the same downfall that Ryan was talking about, specifically difficult integration with the rest of the web page.

I really don’t know what you’d use ‘true power’ for in a web browser, but judging from the quantity of flash games vs. Unity3D games, I’d suggest that Flash’s comparative lack of power is not hurting it as much as you believe. I’m sure there are things it could do better, but 99% of the flash/flex apps out there don’t push the limits of performance. (Excluding video, though 10.1 significantly increases video performance)

As Ryan’s not said it – and bearing in mind that I’m a Mac user, and I loathe what bad Flash content does to my battery – not all of the issues around Flash performance are with Adobe. For instance, the Flash dev team have been quite clear about the way that OS X doesn’t offer them an API to allow hardware acceleration of Flash video on OS X.

There’s also some interesting benchmarks that show 2D drawing on OS X is far slower than on Windows XP. The flipside of this is that you rarely see the kind of ‘artefacts’ you often get on Windows XP where drawing operations fail while dragging a window around while the system is busy. Part of this is down to the approach where rather than drawing directly to the screen memory, drawing ‘off-screen’ and then compositing what’s shown to the user (although Vista, Win 7 and many desktop Linux also use the same approach). Other issues, I suspect relate to things like sub-pixel anti-aliasing (which can make vector drawing look a lot better, and requires you to draw to a higher resolution that you display).

What was interesting was that some of the higher level APIs, on the other hand, were far faster. CoreAnimation, for instance, often uses GPU acceleration (presumably sacrificing sub-pixel accuracy for speed). What I don’t know is how Flash interacts with these layers, and to what degree it implements it’s own drawing libraries vs being dependent on the ones in the OS.

To be honest, the biggest problem I have with Flash performance often comes from very simple content – I’ve seen banner adverts with a static image using up 100% CPU, and I’ve seen complex 3D Papervision demos using 13% or so – presumably because the people doing the latter had to focus on performance to achieve their demo (and therefore on a high-spec machine it will use little CPU) whereas the banner ad guys have done something stupid, like set a timer loop to 0 msecs, because they don’t think about performance at all. Another question is how much of this content uses the new AS3 VM, which is much faster and better optimised, and how much of it is done using earlier versions.

(Maybe the Flash tooling needs improvement here, doing some static analysis on the code and warning of stupid things?? I do think that the likes of Yahoo should monitor and ban adverts that use excessive CPU – what is the carbon footprint of every Yahoo Mail user losing 1 hour of battery life per charge cycle?).

Pavel – I think some of the reasons why 3D may be faster possibly relate to the issues I touch on above – the 3D plugins tend to be wrappers over OpenGL and therefore GPU acceleration – whereas 2D drawing tends to be over Quartz, and video over Quicktime (which again, is hardware accelerated for the formats Quicktime natively supports).

In terms of the basic model, I don’t think there is a whole lot of difference between HTML’s Canvas and SVG combined with JavaScript, and Flash’s stage+ActionScript, and from what I’ve seen of Canvas and SVG demos they do not significantly less CPU than Flash (a few percentage points variance). Where people do anything with a complex UI in the browser (let’s say using Capuccino or GWT or one of the other complex JavaScript frameworks) the time to load and memory usage of the app flies right up.

Maybe it’s just a category problem – i.e. there are a lot of people out there who want the browser or Flash to be a universal operating system, when it’s not. Let’s face it, there’s a reason why an app runtime like .NET or Cocoa is vastly bigger than a web browser (and the browser often hugely bigger than Flash) – and that’s before you add in the size of the OS underneath them all, or relative performance. (Hell, there’s still people out there who won’t use C# due to the performance impact).

And my view on cross-platform development is quite strong – you need to start by understanding why your customer is using the platform, rather than starting from the point of view of minimising your costs. You certainly need to understand platform conventions where they exist, and how they differ. Again, considering the iPad, it’s evident that Apple haven’t used the same ‘Mail’ program on the desktop, iPhone and iPad. I’m not advocating writing everything for every platform – a game running full screen on a 3.5” touch screen is going to be the same on any equivalent hardware – just that the idea of universal software is a pipe dream.

Well, at least so long as some of us have something different from a Trabant . . .

@JulesLt I Agree with you. I talked about 3D as result. High CPU usage is caused with even slightly more complicated banner. And because CPU must do so much work just for simple stuff performance is affected obviously. Term performance covers huge spectrum of other topics, it’s not one entity so it’s hard to discuss about that directly. Also you have point about “universal software”. That’s just utopia. But world is not black and white, so none of extremes is good. One platform for every single programs neither unique program for every different platform. The middle is best most of the times. You must count costs, user experience, maintainability and lot of other factors and I think that’s the reason flash is here. I think it’s great presentation layer. But project generally has more that just that.(backend,db,soa..) That’s lot of different languages and platforms. For example I like .NET for its capabilities in backend area but don’t like its front end presentation architecture. That’s why I prefer Flash.NET …I think having one consistent presentation layer base is great idea but currently is still in infancy. If application can resize according to user request It can also retransform to different device request. But again, platform evolution is not mature enough to allow you do it seamlessly. I just think that Flash(flex including) has much more potential here and on application field. It doesn’t need to replace them. I don’t need AS3 server-side language, I don’t need Flash Oracle, I don’t need Flash Halo 3… I don’t need flash to do everything, just do what it do best, user experience only do it better because I think there is definitely room for that.

Pavel – but the interesting thing is that point about seeing Papervision demos that use less CPU than a banner advert – I think there’s a mix of things here – performance of the Flash player, and performance of the code produced by the Flash authoring tools.

We’ve had issues (memory leaks, high CPU usage) with our Flex apps, and used the Flash debugger to eliminate them.

I’d wager that the average banner ad designer never does that, or even looks at the performance of what they’ve done.

Performance of the Flash player should be improved with 10.1, as that is the version that shares the same codebase with the mobile/Open Screen edition Adobe have been working on – i.e. moving away from having a separate desktop and mobile edition, and dealing with having to deploy the same plugin across 4 desktop OS and at least 4 mobile OS, plus games consoles and set-top boxes using 3 distinct CPU architectures.

And that, I think, is the problem anyone introducing a new web plugin will face. It’s no longer 1997, with over 95% of the things connecting to the web being Windows PCs running Netscape or IE. Hence the Open Screen Project.

Taking a look at my installed plugins, I’m trying to work out why we will see new ones.

What new types of content may need new plugins?

Video & Audio : DivX, VLC (Google video/Ogg), Veoh, Quicktime (which itself has various plug-ins for codecs, inc. Quartz Composer for OpenGL animations).

App runtimes : Curl, Java, Silverlight, Flash, Unity

Curl’s interesting but pretty much dead outside the Intranet, and inside the Intranet you may as well use .NET and an auto-update framework for your clients.

Java – ditto. If you’re going to use it, may as well do so out of the browser, or use WebStart rather than as a plugin.

Unity – it’s an interesting one, because what it offers (3D graphics) is on the roadmap of both Flash and web standards. On the other hand, like Adobe, Unity’s focus is on development tools – they’re happy to compile down to iPhone apps as well as their plugin.

My gut feel is that 3D will come to the browser before Unity is widely installed – even if Facebook games started pushing it out, it’s one of those things (like media plugins) that will meet the might of the IT department.

Other : Google Earth, iPhoto Photocast, emusic

Never seen the first two used in any site, and these days I use the emusic standalone app (built using the Mozilla codebase) because the plug-in was always flaky. URL integration to local apps seems far more common than plugins.