Perhaps this the blame should be put on distro creators. You see, I did not CHOOSE to run 64bit Firefox, it comes as standard with 64bit Mandriva.

Now on Windows I will just install the 32bit version of Firefox and be done with it. On Linux, I had to try to remove the traces of 64bit Firefox or at least get it to look at the 32bit files instead.

It is actually working now, magically fixed itself when I manually installed Firefox 3.5 32bit.

But like you said, if 64bit FLASH is Alpha status then that is EXACTLY the argument for HTML 5. I shouldn’t be forced to have inferior support simply because I am using 64bit software and with the browser supporting things natively, that should no longer be an issue.

http://tools.google.com/dlpage/o3d

- video grabs attention because you couldn’t do anything like it before without a plugin, and it makes a good screenshot

Tim

At this rate I think that HTML5 will be as much of a thread to Flash as SVG was at the time. Remember SVG?

I’m not sure who recently posted something on Twitter along the lines of:
“Try your luck at this with HTML5: http://www.eternalmoonwalk.com”

Sums it up nicely.

Microsoft owns the platform that all of them must rest upon, or at least the best platform( IMO), and everybody from IBM to Sun, to you name it, wishes they had that platform. Not to mention the Office franchise, these are things to be envied by ANY business man worth talking about.

I’ve seen both sides, being a unix/java developer before moving to windows/C#, and falling in love with the Silverlight platform.

Quite frankly, C# got better than Java, and Silverlight is better than Flex(without threading, I don’t consider it viable in the long term).

Microsoft has done it again, embracing and extending to produce a better product, but this time, better technologically as well as ease of use.

I both admire them and to a degree dislike them for some of the things they do, but I must admit that their behavior has been going in the right direction.

Open Source is good for some things, but not all things. I do lean heavily on the operating system being open source, but would back off if it’s openly extensible.

So let Google and others try to limit or destroy MS’s platform and tools, I think it’s great. Hopefully they will either come up with something better, or invent some useful things along the way. Either way, we should benefit, and also get some innovation out of MS as they struggle to maintain dominance.

I think the dynamic that people hate, is the dynamic we need for innovation. You have to break some eggs to make an omlette…

Consider things from Google’s point of view. Let’s say you are a developer working on Voice and Video Chat for Gmail.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100173&hl=en

You know you can display H.264 video using Flash but you also know that Flash doesn’t encode in H.264 and doesn’t use a license-free peer-to-peer protocol for streaming between clients. So what do you do?

If the Flash Player was open source, or if Adobe had a modular and open extension mechanism in the Flash Player, Google might have considered working to extend Flash. But it doesn’t. If you want a new feature you have to ask Adobe to implement it. And some features like Adobe’s new peer-to-peer protocol RTMFP will cost money to use.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/

So, what did Google do? They wrote their own browser plugin to encode video and stream it. So you can understand why, when Tim asked Google’s Dion Almaer about Adobe Flash he said “it’s not open enough” for Google.

http://www.itwriting.com/blog/931-google-adobe-mozilla-open-source-war-of-words-is-all-about-owning-the-platform.html

So, I think it is political in the sense that the Flash platform is controlled by Adobe which makes it less useful as a platform for Google and some others. Of course mileage varies. For a small IT shop like the one I work in, Flash is very useful.

@Tim, Adobe doesn’t have to open-source the Flash Player. Through the Open Screen Project, they’ve open-sourced the SWF format and anyone is free to build there own Flash Player. If it takes off, Flash might be even more ubiquitous – and hopefully better performing through increased competition – than it is now. For example, Bsquare are building their own Flash plugin for Android: http://ostatic.com/blog/bsquare-has-an-adobe-flash-browser-plug-in-for-android-devices

The HTML5 video tag will never take off if Mozilla chooses not to/can’t afford to license H.264. Google, Apple, Adobe and even Microsoft in Silverlight 3 are supporting H.264 because the quality is superior to Theora. It would be ironic if it turns out that Mozilla become the biggest obstacle to the adoption of the Video tag that they have been championing for some time. However, when extensions in Chrome are fully implemented we might see Chrome crush Firefox anyway given the huge disparity in resources available to Google vs Mozilla Foundation (everyone knows Google provides the majority of Mozilla’s revenue anyway).

It’s true they don’t like it, but the reason is wrong. If you have no products that people are willing to shell out big bucks for, you attack the people that do.

They’re jealous of Microsoft’s hard fought victory to win marketshare in office, dev tools, etc.

IMO, that’ the evil, however, Microsoft has perpetrated plenty of evil on it’s own, so don’t think I’m defending them in general, just this specific subject.

Its weakness was “we’ll offer a solution!” without describing what that solution was, which is how the ludicrous codec situation came about.

With Apple apparently focusing on H.264 via VIDEO, and Google’s recent ffmpeg announcement for H.264, Firefox 3.5 users risk seeing pages with VIDEO tags which Firefox cannot fulfill. (Moz staffer Chris Double has some of the best comments on the licensing situation.)

Adobe already pays H.264 licensing for viewing in Firefox browsers. The Adobe positioning from two years ago requested that VIDEO tag have some mechanism to call up any available renderer, not just the browser’s proprietary implementation:
http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/minutes#item06

If there had been a little less anti-plugin rhetoric, and more emphasis on how technologies could cooperate together, then over the coming months Firefox would not be at risk from pages written for other vendors’ H.264 VIDEO.

No action item on this — little can be done now, without major course-correction — but the irony may be useful to reflect upon.

jd/adobe

The people who see Adobe fighting standards-based web technologies seem to ignore facts like the main reason that Firefox 3.5′s JavaScript engine is so fast, is because Adobe donated the code base to it’s ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 from Flash Player 9 to Mozilla.

Meanwhile, the video tag has other issues that stop it from over taking Flash video, such as video codec issues. Here’s Ian Hickson, editor of HTML5 summing up where things currently stand with the major browsers (via http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html ):

“Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.

Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.

Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.

Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.

Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support at all.”

Also currently the video tag has no security measures, meaning anyone can download the video file to their computer. Without that, we won’t see companies like Hulu, NetFlix and any other company that values it’s content switch over to HTML5 video tag any time soon.

The video tag is also missing simple features such as full screen video and more complex features that Silverlight and Flash recently introduced such as variable bit-rates, so that video can keep can streaming even when user’s internet connection slows down. Adobe just introduced peer-to-peer video capabilities in Flash Player 10, which we are likely to see more of as the penetration numbers of Flash Player 10 go up (currently at 85% in the US/Canada). So both Adobe and Microsoft are not exactly standing still when it comes to video adding new features.

Now browsers could attempt to incorporate similar features, but I doubt they would all see eye to eye on implementations when they cannot even agree on video codecs.

Also Adobe can get over 90 percent of users to upgrade Flash in under a year, while there tends to be 5 year cycle before over 90 percent of users upgrade their browser. Meaning that video in the browser will likely always lag behind in any new features and even codecs.

Most people who measure these things get results roughly similar to the riastats.com page.

Today it shows:

3% of visitors don’t have Flash
69% of visitors don’t have Silverlight
27% of visitors don’t have Java

Of course this begs the question how many people will have support for the video tag or advanced canvas features by the end of this year?

If someone is actually measuring how many people have a browser with full draft HTML 5 compliance it would be nice to see the numbers.

Is Flash evil? No, I don’t think so. Is it frustrating for many Linux users? Yes! Does it have limitations because it is from a single vendor? Yes. Does it have advantages because it is from a single vendor. Yes.

I think Tim got it right when he wrote: “it is political; Google, Apple etc don’t like a single company owning the platform.”

At any rate, I hope Microsoft steps up on HTML 5. But we’ll have to wait and see.