All out war on Adobe?
There is an interesting thing happening in the browser space at the moment under the rubric of HTML5 video. Both Apple and Google are pushing H.264, which is causing some friction. Firstly, here is John Gruber, aka Daring Fireball, talking about how flash video sucks on OSX and why he thinks Apple's iTablet will ship sans flash. And here's Christopher Blizzard talking about why FireFox won't support the H.264 encoding for patent reasons.
Reading between the lines, it looks to me like Google and Apple have both decided it's time to evict flash from the web. Once YouTube switches over to by-default html5 video flash loses the network effect that has kept it on everyone's desktop and laptop. Heck, even just having iPhones sans flash was enough of a network effect loss to have some of my previous employers to switch their previously flash/flex webapps to pure html/ajax sites. Add in YouTube not forcing flash updates, and flash disappears from the market in a haze of version skew.
One of the things I am toying with at the moment is the potential for building a replacement for flash application authoring based on SVG. These thoughts have been inspired by Gordon: An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript.
Interesting times.
Reading between the lines, it looks to me like Google and Apple have both decided it's time to evict flash from the web. Once YouTube switches over to by-default html5 video flash loses the network effect that has kept it on everyone's desktop and laptop. Heck, even just having iPhones sans flash was enough of a network effect loss to have some of my previous employers to switch their previously flash/flex webapps to pure html/ajax sites. Add in YouTube not forcing flash updates, and flash disappears from the market in a haze of version skew.
One of the things I am toying with at the moment is the potential for building a replacement for flash application authoring based on SVG. These thoughts have been inspired by Gordon: An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript.
Interesting times.