The Battle for Developers: Flash vs HTML5

"Battle for developers" is a short and sharp description of the situation that has emerged recently in the environment that we all live in - the Internet. The Web audience can't stop buzzing about the "Epic Battle" between Flash and HTML 5. Here are some facts of this confrontation. The cornerstone of this struggle lies in a rivalry between Apple and Adobe. But now it is not a simple fight between two of the world's leading IT companies - it is more of a struggle for the future of the web itself. Internet never stops evolving and HTML 5 is the evident results of this process - along with Adobe Flash.

The Video Episode

It is not a secret that most of the web standards are very much tied to Flash technology and when such media giants as YouTube and Vimeo have started playing their content with the help of HMTL 5 in addition to the good old Flash and it was a huge surprise for some companies. Here are examples of two players that are avaliable on YouTube. The designs are almost identical but there are several details that are worth being mentioned. HTML5 player has original feature that allows to choose the connection speed - you can see this panel in the bottom left corner. Plus, since it's HTML 5 the player is so far supported by just a few browsers - but that's more like a problem of a browser, not the player. What's also important is that the HTML 5 player is faster than the Flash player.

HTML5 YouTube Player

Flash YouTube Player

HTML5 - Things We All Totally Love About It!

In our opinion HTML 5 is a great web standard that does have a lot of brilliant features that neither HTML 4 nor Flash have.

• First and foremost HTML 5 greatly simplifies the creation of websites and web products.
• Video elements. We've already mentioned that video elements thing and this is one of the best HTML 5 features because you can embed video without having to use any kinds of third party services.
• HTML 5 facilitates your work with various web applications and this is really cool feature because it allows you to implement different apps even without having an Internet connection.
• Another great feature is the new approach to the "canvas" element. According to the developers this element will allow you to design it all "on-the-fly". Here's a great example of using this tag - below you'll find a great model called Cloth Simulation. This model was created by Andrew Hoyer with the help of the canvas tag and some jQuery scripts.

Anyways HTML 5 is now a young and a very strong technology that keeps on growing in its quality and accessibility. We are not sure if many of you have seen HTML 5 in action so here are some examples of original live websites based on HTML 5 and you can check out all advantages and weaknesses of their design and functionality.

The Design Superhero

Lindsey Baker Photography

Zoocha

Nimbupani

Martin Sarsini

And the winner is...

Adobe Flash is a very honorable and long-standing technology that never stops surprising the web users with the spectacular websites, functional applications and many other features. Though YouTube and some other companies offer an alternative to the Flash player it is still a very powerful software and the latest release of Flash player for mobile browsers speaks for itself. Now what about Apple? Why don't they just use Flash apps on their iPhone and iPad? Flash is really good but it stays a third-party application and Apple showed us that there is an alternative for Flash. As the result we all are in the middle of the battle between these two monsters and it is really hard to foresee the result of this battle.

Summing up everything aforementioned we can state that there are few things that are clear to us.

First is that HTML 5 is a great technology but it still needs some time to gain a foothold. We really hope that this web standard will take its place in the web design world. Someplace close TO Flash but not the place OF Flash.

And the second thing is that many experts (like Gizmodo and TechCrunch) claim that developers turned out to be in the center of this fight and the destiny of future web standards is in their hands. And it's obvious that the lucky winner of the battle will have to attract millions of developers since they're the ones who have the real impact on the industry's end user. No company is now able to either change the world or leave it unchanged only with its own resources - the world has to actually be crazy about you. Well, in several years we'll see who it's going to be - Apple's HTML 5 or Adobe Flash.

But one thing is obvious - we as simple consumers will without a doubt win whatever the results would be. So let's sit back and observe while trying to figure out the side to stick to.

In case you want to know more about HTML5 please feel free to check out the related research - HTML5 - New Old Semantics.