What I don't understand is all the people praising HTML5 because it uses less CPU than Flash yet Chrome ends up using 15-20% CPU just to render a simple animation unlike Flash.
I believe this example is a SWF running in Canvas (as opposed to vanilla HTML5).
Regardless, with HTML5 you have all the benefits of an OSS rendering engine where performance can be improved by individual implementors (eg, Apple improving WebKit on A4/ARM) or groups of developers with similar interests (eg, Google/Apple/other contributors to WebKit for x86). Where as with Adobe's Flash plugin, you're pretty much reduced to hoping or praying that Adobe will fix problems relevant to your interests.
In other words, the performance may suck now in some demos, but the situation is better than relying on Adobe... for some companies anyway.
Some people probably just assume that switching to HTML5 content always uses fewer CPU resources. There are plenty of informed reasons to prefer HTML content over Flash though. One is that putting performance into the hands of multiple companies will introduce competition. Just like with Javascript speeds, you can expect browser-makers to start racing in other areas of HTML5 performance.
I wouldn't be surprised to see HTML5 outperform equivalent Flash content in a year or so.
The amount of work required to do so is epic, and considering the rate of Flash's evolution it's like getting on a treadmill whose speed is controlled by Adobe.
Funny metaphor, and very accurate. However, HTML5 is like that same treadmill, only that people still have to build the treadmill itself. It's epic work times two.
That standard is for Flash as it existed several years ago AFAIK. It's not useful for creating a viable competitor to modern Flash except maybe as a jumping-off point to the actual hard work.
I'm sorry I haven't noticed. But I do have noticed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387630 because it points to the page I was posting, the homepage. Too bad it hasn't became very popular
If this means that animated advertisements and other ad agency annoyances will be coming soon to my iPad web browsing experience, put me down as a detractor.
The sad thing: the ads were coming anyway. If you build a popular platform like the iPad, the advertisers will find a way to get ads on it, whether it's with Flash or not.
But by banning Flash, Apple is pushing advertisers to HTML/Javascript, which ruins the experience for those marginal, blissful few who use Flash blockers on other platforms. Really, you couldn't have asked for a better indicator, short of a mandatory <lowvaluecontent> tag. :)
The question is not whether you can, but whether you should.
People who make things deserve to get paid. If you don't like what they make, fine, don't read it.
If you try and rip other people's content sponsors with a bayesian content classifier they'll be more likely to have subtler 'product placement' style sponsorship to avoid your ad ripper. They may also have things that appear as ads to your rip app that are required to navigate or read the site. However, rather than avoid a technical war, why not consider either going somewhere else or accepting that content you like is made by people who like being compensated for it?
I agree with your basic premise--that people deserve to get paid for providing me with value--but not with the mechanism of ads embedded in content.
A few reasons:
If the creator deserves to get paid, he can put up a pay wall and we can do business or I can go elsewhere. If that basic business model doesn't work, that is a strong hint that something is fundamentally broken about advertising.
Also, you pose it as giving me a choice of going elsewhere. How does that work when given a link on HN or in an email or whatever? On some sites, there's an ad right away and I can click a link to skip the ad, I can click "back," or I can look at the ad if it's interesting. Fine.
But if ads are embedded in content willy-nilly, I am blasted with them before I get to make the choice of whether to read the content. Again, there's something broken about the model if the content producer can't set up a simple gate where I can choose whether to do read their content+ads or go elsewhere.
Finally, ads in content are a deeply broken model. The reason Google is worth a zillion dollars is that ads at the moment of search are hitting me when I'm making a decision and they are providing value, even if they are biased. Ads in most types of content are hitting me when I'm not trying to make a decision.
There are some exceptions, and I'll bet they survive. An ad in StackOverflow for a programming tool that matches the answer to a question might work when I'm trying to solve a problem. If sites like that do a good job of working with ad networks to deliver the right ads, they might survive.
Almost all other content-based ads are going to continue to git shriller and shriller as they try to maximize dwindling attention. The attention is dwindling precisely because they are trying to work around a deeply broken interaction.
I don't think that people who use ad-blockers will hurt profit so much, because people like that are probably geeks and they generally don't pay attention to ads unless they are really interested in their content. So if your audience is geeky, you might want to find another revenue model.
I suspect (OK, I'd like if) someone will release a spamassassin/dspam variant targeted at ads as a proxy, optionally with some distributed Pyzor goodness thrown in.
In an ideal world, it would be open-source and locally-installable, a la Privoxy.
In a slightly-less-than-ideal world, it'll be hosted somewhere "out there". It will probably be wonderful for 6-12 months, then bog down as everyone starts using it, then the site owners will use it to start serving ads themselves. At which point their only hope for any kind of redemption will be if they've called the service some variant on 'samsara': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saṃsāra
Why would you want to do that for? You would still have the annoying ads (or whatever) plus the overhead of a chrome extension to convert them when the page loads!
I don't like flash on the web, but I do occasionally run across a site that requires flash for navigation. I thought an extension would be interesting. Also, I have an ad blocker.
yes, it's all still being improved and the engines will be a lot faster in a few years, but how about first creating a true alternative, then start bashing flash.
I don't mind getting rid of flash, but please, lets try to move forward with technology at the same time. Not two steps back, just to remove a competitor so we end up at the same point three years later...
None of the demos they show that I saw playback FLVs, where are you looking at those?
Also worth noting that in one of their demos they say that it only supports up to a "sizable subset of Flash 8" for playback currently. From: http://smokescreen.us/demos/intro.html
I think it is just further proof that necessity is the mother of invention.
Flash was invented out of a need for artists to be able to create animations on the web. Now there is a back catalog of Flash content which is losing a home. A swf player of some kind is needed to preserve that content. Someone had to build this.
I completely agree with you. However, I don't think this is a invention directly out of necessity. Instead, I would say closed systems with a controlled goal might be the fertilizer for a better design.
Perhaps, but this is very much a "broken-window theory" type of innovation. If this undoubtedly smart developer hadn't needed to work on this to get around Apple's policy, who knows what more progressive achievement he could have accomplished?
In Chrome on Mac, the techno Strongbad Email played perfectly fine, and my computer didn't burn me. I'd say it's a success, though still lots of room to grow I imagine.
because their SWF format has been open for years and someone wrote another HTML 5 renderer that works with a subset of Flash content and performs terrible?
Very interesting! Running the Smokescreen JavaScript flash player did not cause my battery life to go down like normal flash does. I always watch that when I am running a flash YouTube video or flash game.
It will be interesting to see how the performance works with more complex games.
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