Speaking to TechRadar, Opera product analyst Phillip Grønvold conceded that Flash is essential to today’s web and will be for the foreseeable future. But for internet video, he says, there are alternatives that won’t make your laptop a stove top.
Everyone’s been pitching in their two cents on the matter of Flash, and now Opera has offered their pragmatic perspective. Flash is deeply integrated into the web and isn’t going away any time soon, says Grønvold, but eventually Adobe will have to embrace open web standards to thrive:
Today’s internet content is dependant on Flash. If you remove Flash you do not have today’s internet. But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology…
But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices]once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that…
For some reason it’s not part of the fabric of the web currently and Flash either needs to include itself in the future of the web and open web standards or its technology is going to be consistently under attack from all sides as the open web standard movement grows further and further.
So Opera comes down somewhere in the middle – Flash isn’t perfect, but the internet’s an imperfect place. Still, as Opera sees it, the fabric of the web is changing, and it’s up to Adobe to change along with it. [TechRadar]
matt
Friday, May 7, 2010 at 12:15 PMremember that “open web standards” are to browser developers what Flash is to adobe.
I don’t get it. flash uses h264 as its codec now like everything else, like HTML5 I’m sure its just as efficiently hardware decoded. sure if its now exactly the same as HTML5 for video you’d have to ask why use flash, why not just use HTML5, but some people like flash, they know flash, also I bet there are customizations to the movie player that can only be done, or done better in flash.
I agree that flash is overkill for many things, and it could be more efficient when only basic features are being used, but all these things are stuff for the DEVELOPER to consider, NOT Apple, or the browser developers to decide for us!