HTML5 Vs. Flash. FIGHT!

Well, where do I begin here. A good place to start might be that there seems to be a lot of, well deserved, buzz about HTML5 (A.K.A. The Flash Killer). Taking it on face value, that may very well be the case. Investigating the hype a little closer, though, the facts remain that Flash will be with us for some time yet.

Why? Well first of all, in part, it's down to Apple. Really? Yes. First of all, it appears that they are so hell-bent on pushing HTML5, Apple have refused hardware acceleration access to the Flash Player. According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is supported neither by Linux nor Mac OSX, the latter because OSX does not expose hardware acceleration access to the API's that require it. Adobe goes on to say that "The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."

There are many arguments, of course, for this flat blocking. The main one being that the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad are deemed, by some, to be at risk of over heating if hardware acceleration is allowed. Draining battery power and hoggin the processor. I know I personally would not like my device to melt in my hand for no other reason than watching a video of some kid tearing his house apart because his parents stole his XBox 360 ... funny as it sounds. Thats not to say, though, that Apples' other devices don't struggle at times with Flash, as is. I don't know about you, but my (admittedly aging) MacBook Pro tends to get pretty damn hot when running flash ... and don't even talk to me about HD Flash video. So what can HTML5 offer me?

In terms of what HTML5, coupled with CSS, SVG and JavaScript, can accomplish is very impressive indeed. It provides native video and audio playback, nice transitions, animation capability and a level of interactivity never before seen without the use of Flash. And in the furture, who knows where this will go. That said, there a few things that we are overlooking here ... firstly, it's not the future. HTML5 has a long way to go.

Secondly, from a Developers point of view, Flash provides one environment to develop in. One platform. One IDE. One technology. And is multi-platform and multi-browser compatible. On the otherside, we have HTML5, SVG, CSS3 and JavaScript. Multiple languages in multiple development environments ... and as yet, not multi-browser compatible. It isn't so easy to find someone proficient enough to work on all 4 technologies and still be able to achieve what Flash can.

Thirdly, from a Designer point of view, the Flash IDE provides a relatively easy set of tools for drawing complex objects and shapes, containing far more detail than SVG can. What HTML5 "promises" to deliver in the furture is a rich interactive web experience that has the same smooth object animation, tweening effects, and video that has forever been in the domain of Flash. One thing anti-Flash campaigners have to face, however, is that the web is currently made by designers, most of which don't have the skills to code, and that programmatic animation and rich UI coding is no easy task.

So, unless someone comes up with a unified environment that will give designers the same ability to produce timeline and tweened animations, in-app vector manipulation, multi-channel audio integration and nested movieclip objects in HTML5, with the same ease currently being accomplished in Flash, don't expect to see Flash disappear anytime in the near future.

To finish with, I think it's interesting to look at tests of how HTML5 performs against Flash on the 2 major platforms (Windows and Mac OSX) and all the major browsers ... maybe then you can judge for yourself.

Mac Tests

- With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%
- With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)
- With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome

Windows Tests

- Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU
- Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.
- On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0
- In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU

The above platform/browser test information was taken from readwriteweb.com, and was published on March 10, 2010.