I think a key way to look at this is to examine the rate of change in what the Flash player and browsers have delivered over the last five years – not just in terms of performance but also in terms of the capabilities their APIs deliver. By this I don’t mean the rate of change in a given product. I mean what they deliver to over 90% of users on the public Internet. Even if Google buys OEM space on the desktop (nice post by the way) the rate of change in the browser space is still constrained.

I guess you could say that if there was no XMLHttpRequest and Google wasn’t funding Firefox and Chrome then there might never have been an upper bound on how far Adobe could push Flash as a platform. But there has always been an upper bound for Flash and I’m not sure that upper bound has really changed that much.

If Chrome is wildly successful it will have a bigger impact on Microsoft and what it can leverage from IE than it will on Adobe.

Cheers,
-Brian

Nevertheless I think it is a potential game-changer. It is not yet a full alternative to Flash, but it will gradually make Flash less necessary. Look what Google already achieves with hardly any Flash (Youtube aside).

I’ve also noticed that Chrome is very quick and easy to install – just as Flash is. I think it will be soon be widely deployed, especially once it comes out of beta and is available for the Mac.

Tim

In the Chrome cartoon a plugin crashes through Chrome’s sandbox security scheme. Then we read Chrome allows this “…because Web pages are more than just HTML and JavaScript.”

If Chrome had been announced four of five years ago and all the versions of Internet Explorer had less than 80% of the market, then the Chrome announcement might have been much worse for Adobe. Instead, the near stagnation in the capacity of browsers to deliver rich applications over the last six or so years gave Adobe the runway they needed to deliver things like Flash 9, accelerated rendering of h.264, ActionScript 3, Flex, and AIR.

IE 6 is still used by many millions of people. The kind of performance delivered by Firefox’s upcoming tracing JIT and Chrome’s V8 will not be ubiquitous on the Web for years. So Adobe has more space to further establish Flash as a platform and Microsoft has more time to get Silverlight out of beta. Aside from the obvious improvements in performance that Adobe can get by implementing language features like typed fixed-length arrays and JIT improvements like tracing, Flash player 10 now includes controlled streaming of audio, video, and data directly between Flash players (limited Peer-to-Peer) , support for hardware accelerated 3D primitives, much improved text handling, enhanced sound and drawing APIs etc.

All the things are still in place that made Macromedia Flash attractive to Adobe in the first place. Flash 9 is well past the 90% distribution mark and Adobe can rapidly evolve features in the Flash player.

For Zoho and other developers focused on AJAX, a two or three times increase in JavaScript performance in upcoming browsers is good news. If IE 8 delivered similar performance and IE 6 and 7 could be made to disappear tomorrow – that would be even better news for AJAX as THE Web application platform. But, these things take time and everyone (except perhaps Microsoft) is pushing the envelope. It took Adobe years to get to get to ActionScript 3. It took Google two years before they were ready to release a beta of Chrome.

In that respect Sridhar’s comments about the “biggest losers” seems more appropriate for sporting events than the evolution of the Web.

Cheers,
-Brian

Can you help us narrow down the problem? My email address is there in the reply form, and I can put you in touch with our network team, so they can figure out where it becomes slow.

Thanks,
Sridhar