I was building a website for Digital Point Ads, and for what I wanted it to do, I figured Flash would be the way to go. So it was built, and worked fine in Flash.
The problem is that I’m an anal perfectionist and the Flash object was eating 80-90% of a computer’s CPU when being viewed… and me being me, I couldn’t just be okay with that.
…so I rebuilt it with CSS3/HTML5/jQuery. It turned out much nicer in my opinion, only uses about 1% of the resources that Flash needed and as an unintentional bonus, it works on things like iPad and phones/computers without Flash support.
I’m not anti-Flash (as I said, I *wanted* to do the site with Flash), but I AM anti-inefficient. There are still some things you can’t do with HTML5 that you can do with Flash, but those things are becoming fewer and fewer it seems.
So are you typing this from Prison?
Yeah, they actually give us 100Mbit up/down here and supposedly we are getting 64GB iPads for everyone in a couple weeks. Hopefully I don’t have to have a stupid white one. 🙂
Netflix recently replaced their Flash video player with Silverlight. It is SOOOOO much more efficient.
Why Adobe never redid Flash’s internal workings from scratch to take advantage of hardware acceleration and the like is beyond me.
I never did any Silverlight development myself (the only Windows “machine” I have exists within a virtualized environment on my Mac and only use it to see how stuff looks with IE9. So considering I don’t have Visual Studio…
Also, I was terribly annoyed about a year ago when my browser was crapping all over itself and it turned out to be a Silverlight plug-in that Microsoft snuck in there probably from something else I installed (even though I wasn’t on a page with any Silverlight stuff). Hopefully it’s gotten better by now.
I’ve also been reading that Microsoft is starting to move away from Silverlight and more towards HTML5… http://www.pcworld.com/article/209449/microsoft_surrenders_silverlight_to_html5_on_crossplatform_front.html
But as I said in my original post, I know there’s some things you can do in Flash and Silverlight that you can’t do in HTML5. I’m no fanboy of HTML5, I just want something that works and works efficiently/well for what *I* need. And for this particular site, I threw away what I did in Flash and opted for redoing it with HTML5 and ended up pretty happy with how it came out.