Round #1 Video

  • Flash Video was probably one of the most widely used features in Flash. It loaded pretty fast as long as you have the right version of the plugin. The downside was the hardware on your computer would heat up and the only way to create a Flash video player would be to buy Adobe’s Flash.

  • HTML5 however is free opensource and easy to implement. It requires a place to host your video file, and multiple video files due to browser standards being different currently. In the next year or two everything may use it. The downside is there is no security to your video files, and there isn’t a way to make it all work with one file type the way Flash works.

  • The Winner is Flash– Do to standards being different and the way the web is currently set up right now it is hard to implement HTML5 video. I think in a year or two it may become the default standard for web video for a number of reasons, but right now Flash is the better option.

Round #2 Canvas

  • Flash has the ability to let you draw using drawing API’s and classes.

  • HTML5 has about the same functionality as Flash on this one except it uses the canvas tag exporting to .SVG which is opensource and stretchable as it scales nicely in a window.

  • The Winner is HTML5– Making things opensource and render quickly is what HTML5 does well. I’ve seen some amazing drawing apps using the canvas. It is easy and amazing what you can do and the future looks to be very bright. However with Flash you can make Adobe Air offline apps as well, but I still like the load time of HTML5 over Flash on this one.

Round #3 Web Apps

  • Flash has a platform called Adobe Air which is the offline desktop version of flash. It was revolutionary at the time but I think it’s usefulness has gone down, and it has to be updated constantly to meet the new requirement in the flash player plugin. Flash also has the Android platform and mobile Flashlite platform which is very cool to see mobile websites that use Flash.

  • HTML5 however has a lot of built in features that doesn’t require a lot of updates because it’s built into the browser. It utilizes javascript speed and local storage as well as geolocation for devices and is very simple to learn and is open source. Apple has been adopting these standards as well as Microsoft. It appears to be the future of the web browser.

  • The Winner is HTML5– It really seems to be trending right now and I’m kind of blown away by the development projects based on HTML5. It’s free and easy to learn there should be more websites that use these new features. I think it will trend higher over time. Plus I haven’t seen any cool Android Flash things that really top any of the HTML5 things. Although I probably wouldn’t know it was flash on a mobile phone anyway.


Round #4 Adoption

  • Flash has been around a long time. It’s more popular than Windows Media Player, Silverlight, and Quicktime. Flash is on around 96% of all desktop computers. It was the largest interactive platform online. It compresses images nicely and loads fast. It makes up pretty much all the online video and interactive banner ads online today.

  • HTML5 is the new kid on the block. The long road ahead looks to be very bright and interesting. Knowing more about the future and adoption rate is an unknown at this point. Maybe by the time HTML5 is used widely among all websites we will have HTML6 which might have even more browser capabilities like drag and drop and save to desktop.

  • The Winner is Flash– It really isn’t even close at this point. Mostly because the world still uses Internet Explorer exclusively and it doesn’t support HTML5 standards yet. Flash is the older competitor and has more sites backing it. For what you can do with Flash there really wasn’t much of any competitor to it for a long time. It probably has Adobe shaking in it’s boots.

So Basically those were my list of positive and negative aspects of HTML5 vs. Flash. I hope you enjoyed some of the things you may not have known. Please leave a comment below.