I'd just like to say that QT's awful on 'Doze machines IME...

Diddums. I read somewhere today that mobile Safari visits to many web sites is up to about 7% of the total. If the likes of Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate or JibJab - most of whom I've never even heard of, let along visited - want people to stay on their sites, they're going to add content that non-Flash supporting browsers will show.

Content providers will have to move to where their visitors are, not the other way round.

Ernie, Flash is awful on OSX, so we're about quits.

There are literally millions of Flash applications out there which can be freely used by any Flash enabled browser.

By blocking Flash, Apple is forcing the user to search for functionally equivalent applications from their store.

Most of the games posted here on the "Friday Fun" theme are Flash. iPad users will be excluded from the fun.

In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter. When you buy an iPad, you are joining Apple's club. You play with your Apple friends on Apple's sanitised applications by Apple's rules. You no longer associate with the hoi polloi and their dirty dirty Flash.

As to HTML5, is it really feature-rich enough to be a true alternative to Flash, Java and ActiveX?

No matter what browser I use Flash seems to crash it. If ever CPU usage goes up to 100% it is always Flash that has done it. Is it the ITV version of iPlayer that uses Flash? It is the only one I can't stand to watch.

Flash on OSX is indeed awful. Do I take it that on a PC it is pretty wonderful? It has a lot of supporters.

No. It's just as bad on either WinXP/Vista as it is on Mac OS X.

Mark

It's not wonderful, but compared to Real Player it's great.

Flash on a PC (compared to Linux) is very much faster and doesn't crash often; although it is still quite inefficient compared to native code.

I quite like Flash, and some people use it to great effect to create great applications.

However, there are some designers that manage to create the most appalling adverts which take ages to load and require a 10GHz processor to run smoothly, pushing your PC to the limit with all fans at full speed and grinding the browser to a crawl. This isn't because Flash is bad; it's because some designers are inconsiderate morons who think everyone has a quad core work station and gigabit Internet.

JJ, I can't think of a great Flash app. Which would you recommend?

It's only a draft at the moment, but:



http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/

I think HTML5 is the way forward for a lot of media-rich content.

I don't think Flash will disappear altogether, more's the pity, but it will revert to the uses it was originally intended for, which was to show high quality vector animation. Flash these days is way to get video onto most systems without relying on different codecs and player plugins. However, it's led to a bloated plugin that crashes some browsers and hogs processor cycles. I've had experience on my MacBook Pro where Safari's CPU usage has kicked in at over 70% and the fans have come in to cool everything down. Just to watch a duck on a skateboard?

Significant numbers of people these days surf with Flash blockers or plugins that allow them to control when Flash is played on a page. I don't hear many people complaining about not seeing Flash content, to be honest. Flash is, as I've said, a proprietary format, owned and controlled by Adobe. Apple has snubbed Adobe by not allowing Flash to work on their mobile platforms. Adobe could work to make a Flash plugin for such platforms, but instead cry foul.

Here's John Gruber's take on this. http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/blue_boxes

Youtube?

Does actually support H.264, and you can use the site on an iPhone/iPod touch.

Next?

No, they use Silverlight - an alternative made by you-know-who.

The ITVPlayer is awful. It's improved recently, but it used to crash all the time.

I've started another thread for this.

So, can we all agree that QT and Flash are generally 'a bit crap' in general use these days?

Yep.