MattMaroon.com

One of the big things everyone working on the web has been talking about recently is HTML 5. The concept has been simmering for a long time, but the iPad’s conspicuous lack of Flash support (on a device seemingly designed for sites that use it like Hulu or Kongregate) really brought awareness to the issue. Apple is almost certainly trying their damnedest to replace Adobe’s stranglehold on the net with something open.

In general, though, I’m skeptical this will work any time soon. Open standards bodies move abysmally slowly, and perhaps the only thing slower in software is corporate adoption of new browsers. And like it or not, a huge percentage of web surfing (enough that there’s almost never a business case for ignoring it) comes from corporate offices.

To put it in perspective, IE7 came out way back in 2006, and IE6, the bane of all web developers, is still holding solid at ~9% market share. IE7 is at 14%, even though IE8 came out over a year ago. The reasons for this are simple. Corporations have software (intranets, CMSes, etc) built at a certain time for a certain browser, and upgrading to a new browser involves expense with absolutely no benefit at all. Anything your employees need to do at work can be done in IE6. And if Facebook doesn’t support it, well, you don’t pay your employees to use Facebook. (I do, but not everyone makes Facebook games for a living).

When you get down the business case, building your web apps in HTML 5 vs. Flash comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. If either were an equally costly solution, you’d probably use HTML 5 for most things. It’s a better developer experience, and a better user experience. It’s almost always a win-win. In fact in most cases, Flash is probably more costly. It’s brutal to develop in (relative to something like Ruby on Rails) and often requires you to deliver larger files to accomplish anything than you otherwise would have to.

But on the web, scale is large and both marginal and fixed costs are so low as to be irrelevant. If you’re making the next Farmville, whatever extra costs are involved in supporting IE6 and 7 right now are made up for 1,000x over by the extra 25% of customers.

So let’s suppose the best case here. HTML 5 gets ratified formally tomorrow. IE9 comes out tomorrow too, with full support. How long is it until the cost benefit analysis says that developers aren’t shooting themselves in the foot to make their games in a canvas rather than Flash? The answer is years even then, and HTML 5 won’t get ratified tomorrow (and probably not even this year) and IE9 won’t support much of it when it does happen.

So I think Apple is making a big mistake with their avoidance of Flash. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping I’m wrong, because I’d love to see Flash die as much as the next guy, but I’m not holding my breath. The web evolves very slowly, and Android (on which Flash should ship sometime this year) is such a serious competitive threat now that it just doesn’t feel like it’s right to lose on feature.

I suppose there you have two competing long-term goals. One long-term goal is to get a bloated, non-open standard the hell of the internet, which would benefit just about everyone other than Adobe. The other is to win the smart phone land grab, the way Windows did with desktop computers. I think if it were me I’d err on the side of the latter, especially since it’s not clear their actions can tip the balance for the former. It’s possible that Apple could have Flash now and still see a future, 5-10 years down the road, in which it’s dead. I feel like if I were them, or Microsoft, I’d do what I could to support HTML 5 as soon as possible, and as well as possible, and then just wait it out.

This entry was posted on April 20, 2010 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.