Is Flash Dying?

With the launch of Apple’s iPad yesterday, it really makes me wonder if Flash is going to get phased out. Actually it almost seems better just to ask how quickly Flash is going to get phased out. Based on Apple’s list of iPad ready sites, there are some major players that have already cast their lot with HTML5. It seems perfectly logical that web sites are more interested in delivering their content than trying to get Apple to support Flash on its mobile devices.

Nobody wants to maintain two different versions of the same thing, but right now it’s still impossible to go either way, since some browsers don’t support HTML5, and some browsers don’t support Flash. I think once all of the major players in the browser arena support HTML5, content providers will most likely be looking to drop the flash version of their content in order to reduce overhead and streamline their user experience.

Microsoft will be introducing full support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9, and Safari already supports it. There is a sticking point with Firefox, since Mozilla has decided only to support the Ogg Theora video codec in Firefox, according to Mike Shaver, their VP of Engineering.

The roadmap for web sites looking to leave Flash will be determined by the timeline for users moving to browsers that support HTML5. Although based solely on their own site’s traffic, this info from w3schools.com, indicates that there are many people still using IE7 and some still on IE6. Depending on how considerate content providers decide to be, codec support for the <video> tag in HTML5 in Firefox, and Microsoft’s ability to get its user base to install the latest version of Internet Explorer may be two of the only remaining arguments for continuing to support Flash by this time next year for sites that have introduced HTML5 support.