There have been quite a lot of debates going on in the tech communities about Flash and HTML5. Some people strongly believe that HTML5 is going to push off Flash into history and they consider HTML5 to be far more powerful than Flash in web designing. There have been a lot of speculations in the media also regarding the future of Flash with the release of many Flash to HTML5 conversion tools. The leading player in the mobile world, Apple is not promoting Flash in the iOS mobile browsers. However, Android devices still fully support Flash.
Let us have a brief overview of Flash and HTML5.
Flash is basically a multimedia application used for animation designing. It is being largely used by the developers since 1996 and has a strong developer base all over the world. Flash offers exceptional navigation features and highly effective graphical design tools. For the users, Flash can give an amazing online experience with more interactive interfaces and dynamic presentations. Flash is widely being used in games, animations, and online advertisements now.
Similar to its ancestors, HTML5 is also a tool for designing content for web pages. The new age browsers like the Explorer, Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and Opera all implemented HTML5 in order to offer a more user-friendly browsing experience. HTML5 is now being popularly considered as a very effective replacement for Flash. Adobe and Google have now released many tools to convert Flash to HTML 5.
Below are some important point to review the difference between Flash and HTML 5.
Support for Mobile Devices – As we all know, web browsing has become more or less mobile browsing for millions of users. This has now made it a mandate for the developers to create mobile friendly web pages. If your site cracks when opened in a small screen device, then it is not at all worthy to keep it. The Android devices do support Flash apps in the versions up in Android 4.0 and Apple devices also feature limited support to flash apps through the App store. There are many specific Flash apps designed for the touch screen devices. With a strong developer and user base all over the world, it will not be very easy for HTML5 to completely replace Flash. Many of the existing and highly popular Android and iPad apps and games as Machinarium etc. are built on Flash.
Web Browser Support – Many of the old, but still popular web browsers do not support HTML5, but support Flash on the other hand. As per the usage statistics, many of the web users all over the globe are still comfortable using an older version of internet explorer browsers like the IE 6.0 released in 2001, which have not got HTML5 support. It is assumed that it may take another 5 to 10 years’ time for a huge number of users to migrate from the older versions to the new feature-rich browsers. This is the major point raised by the Flash supporters as the complete replacement of Flash with HTML5 may not take place in another 10 years or so.
The complexity of Flash applications, being resistant to conversion – It is true that HTML5 cannot completely replace many of the complex Flash applications. HTML5 can easily replace the videos, ads, and simple animations, but when it comes to relatively complex visualization apps and Flash games, the conversion is not that easy. HTML5 is getting more and more strengthened day by day, but creating complex applications is still a very challenging and tiring task for the comparing novice HTML5 developers. Some of the functionality of Flash still fails to be successfully replicated by HTML5.
The conversion tools – There are many tools available to convert Flash to HTML5 like Swiffy and CreateJS etc. However, these tools are very limited in number and also cannot be called as fully featured. As discussed above, there are many complicated Flash applications, which cannot be converted or replicated to HTML5 and this will necessitate the existence of Flash. There are many new projects taking place for the development of more effective Flash to HTML5 conversion tools and there are many variants like Flash to Javascript – haxe, Adobe’s Flacon JS, Jangaroo etc., which have come up.
The need for third party plug-ins – The most advantageous feature of HTML5 over Flash is that it does not require any additional plug-ins to be downloaded to the browsers while Flash requires an extra plug-in. HTML5 is proved to be highly successful while tested on MAC and Safari etc. However, when tested on Windows and OS, Flash scored better. Flash is still considered to be a great tool for video conferencing, audio recording, and creation of gaming and animation effects. The users need to wait and see which technology is going to win the battle in the long run.