Previous news: 3 August 2009

Flash is dieing, Silverlight is DOA
I'm looking forward to this September when I'll be heading down to the windy seafront of Brighton to join hundreds of other Flash developers to discuss all things vector and ActionScript. It's a fantastically mind expanding and a creatively re-charging experience!...Also I think it won't exist in five years.



How's that for a strong statement? A little over the top as I think it'll still be around, but Flash will be reduced to a side attraction.

I say this as someone who's worked with Flash since version 6 in 2002, which to a fair proportion makes me as late joiner. I've used Flash for many projects over the years because there's never been any other choice, Flash was a consistant and unchanging constant in the standards averse world of web browsers.

However these days things have changed alot:

* JavaScript is much more standardised and worn in
* Google have come to the party with Chrome (& soon Chrome OS)
* Firebug practially makes Firefox into an IDE with a debugger
* HTML 5 (Video support and others)
* jQuery

jQuery is the pretty little box that ties up the rest of those enhancements. It's now quicker and cheaper to create many of the same interactive applications that tradtionally required Flash in a standard web browser.

Let's put it another way, Google Maps, Gmail and pretty much any other Google web application you can name is created in JavaScript. Flash was the sticky tape that used to hold the web together, but it's now grown up enough that we can get rid of it.

Predictions!
Silverlight:
I think it'll stick around another few version, but in the end Microsoft will be crushed by support for HTML 5 features that make sure of it's abilities redundent.

Flash:
Adobe won't let this one go without a fight and I think it'll be a long slow drawn out death. When YouTube (owned by Google) introduces HTML 5 videos, rather than solely Flash it will signal the beginning of the end. After this is will slowly drop out of use apart from a few heavily animated fringe cases.

Mav