There’s a universal hate for Flash amongst many web developers and it has had a bumpy ride over the years and it’s completely understandable given the headaches that is known for causing, but rumours of Flash’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Just because Apple doesn’t support Flash doesn’t mean it’s dying, Adobe are doing great things for HTML5 and CSS3 including changing and adapting Flash to the current state of development.
You can create iOS, Blackberry and Android applications in Flash. Build once and export a multitude of mobile applications, not to mention the ability to also export as an executable Air application that can run on Window, Mac or Linux and you’ve got yourself one hell of an application that no HTML5 functionality will ever be able to rival. Not to mention the ability to access a users microphone and webcam to capture data is something that can’t really be replaced with anything else (although HTML5 supports a media capture API, it’ll be a long time before it gets to the point where we can rely on it).
While support for HTML5 audio, video and media capture is getting better with each passing day, it is far from being a viable replacement for Flash. Love it or hate it, Flash does so much more than HTML5 currently can do and it’ll be a quite a long time before any HTML5 feature beats the so-called “dying Flash” let alone rivals its market share.
The misconception seems to be that Flash is merely for playing back video, creating annoying banner ads and creating games which is plain wrong. The still dominant choice for cross-browser online media has evolved quite a lot over the years and Adobe have their hands both in Flash and HTML5 pies to the point where you can save out Flash projects as HTML5 versions without needing the plugin whatsoever, evidence that Adobe is evolving the platform not laying down and accepting that it’s dying.
Think about what would happen if Flash support were removed from the Internet tomorrow, the Internet would be in peril. People hate to admit it, but we still need and rely on Flash and most likely always will in some form or another 10 or perhaps even 20 years down the track.
