[Macworld]

Post your comments for Time to de-Flash your site? here

[kinless]

"Inconsistent codec support. Chrome supports VP8, and IE9 and Safari support H.264, which means developers have to encode for multiple formats."

Umm, actually Chrome currently supports H.264 too. It's FireFox being stubborn and supporting only Theora/VP8, although Mozilla is considering jumping to H.264 as well since VP8 isn't gaining traction and Google wimped out on dropping H.264 support from Chrome.

This video codec nonsense needs to to end. Just support H.264 and knock off the political games.

[Diesel50]

Firefox/mozilla just recently stated that there going to support h.264 because vp8 is a dead issue and flash is too.

Im not sure but I think one other is supporting vp8 I think it was opera.
I concur too dump flash and VP8 and use h.264. Firfox/Mozilla does not like the royalties for h.264 but the silly thing about it is that most major operating systems already have h.264 support in the os (osx does as well as windows). So there is no need for firefox and mozilla to quibble about this just defer to the os to process the video. In fact I read somewhere that this is exactly what mozilla is doing.

This post has been edited by Diesel50: 18 April 2012 - 02:31 PM

[Speed_Racer]

"Ultimately such sites use Flash in a way that works against some very common user needs: What is the restaurant address? How do I get there? What are your hours? Can I get a reservation?"

I've designed sites for a couple of restaurants and held my ground against that kind of mentality. Okay, I admit that part of it is that I'm not very proficient in Flash. But mainly, I tell the restaurants to give visitors what they want, which is well-organized information, otherwise they'll go elsewhere. A little Javascript and CSS can do wonders with animation, accordions, slideshows, lightboxes, etc., making the site experience richer without making it inaccessible to iOS. Good scripts also degrade gracefully with older browsers, unlike all-or-nothing Flash.

[John__B]

kinless, on 18 April 2012 - 01:14 PM, said:

This video codec nonsense needs to to end. Just support H.264 and knock off the political games.

Has Mozilla even announced which ESR version will finally support H.264?

[DarkSith]

This is a good article. Informative, without being boring or too technical. And while I agree with Adams comments that Flash is fine for a desktop browser, the fact that mobile usage is skyrocketing, websites should create a mobile only version as well since phones aren't as powerful as desktops/laptops, you can have slow or spotty data connections and you are probably moving around as well, not sitting down in a chair.

[bonesb]

"Time to de-Flash your site?" Yes. End. Of. Story.

I know one person who still embraces Flash as a consumer. Flash is great - the videos and ads and noise on too many web pages drive me and most of my friends nuts. Queue up any ESPN web page, and you'll look for a Flash blocker or just leave ESPN's site. Since I installed Lion, I didn't install Flash, using Chrome to watch Flash videos that interest me. Apologies to Adobe - Flash is a great vehicle for delivering medium, but it's your users that just don't get it - when I'm trying to read a web page's content, I don't want to see 47 ads and videos load and play and bounce and scream out for attention and make the web page load like a slug in a race on a cold day all at the same time.

Honestly, I'm rueing the day when Flash isn't overused by every advertising nitwit - how in the Heck are we going to block HTML5 from delivering 32 ads per minute?

[James93lx]

For about a year I've been surfing the web with Flash disabled. The vast majority of web sites I visit use it only for ads, which I don't miss at all, along with slower page loading time and occasional crashes from the Flash code. If I ever really need it, like for a YouTube video, I can always turn it back on and reload the page.

[ShutterbugDoug]

Editing alert: this sentence appears twice "worst of all possible worlds".

[ScottNY71]

My developers use JWPlayer and Flowplayer to serve a single .mp4 video file in Flash on the desktop and as raw MPEG-4 on mobile devices. No code needed other than integrating the player and pointing to the file. You can also use an FLV and MP4 if that serves your needs better (like smaller file size for desktop users).

One thing to note is that you must create the MPEG-4 file with progressive download (streaming) enabled or it won't start to play until it has fully downloaded, and the server must support serving .mp4 files - We've encountered a number of clients whose hosting (usually internal or third party systems tied to specific systems) where that is not enabled for reasons we don't fully understand.

[AppleZilla]

What's 'Flash?'

[darrynpeterlowe]

ScottNY71, on 19 April 2012 - 05:52 AM, said:

My developers use JWPlayer and Flowplayer to serve a single .mp4 video file in Flash on the desktop and as raw MPEG-4 on mobile devices. No code needed other than integrating the player and pointing to the file. You can also use an FLV and MP4 if that serves your needs better (like smaller file size for desktop users).

One thing to note is that you must create the MPEG-4 file with progressive download (streaming) enabled or it won't start to play until it has fully downloaded, and the server must support serving .mp4 files - We've encountered a number of clients whose hosting (usually internal or third party systems tied to specific systems) where that is not enabled for reasons we don't fully understand.

See this is the sort of crap I don't get. Why develop two systems to do the same thing?

On mobile devices raw MP4 is displayed but on desktops Flash is. Why not employ the same method used for mobile for desktop. Extra development time? ZERO.

HTML5 is more than capable of handling many of the things that Flash does and there are also some really amazing players out there like Sublime. I really can't see any need for wasting people's time with Flash when there actually are much more viable alternatives.