The future of flash: enrich old browsers with HTML5 abilities?

written by Dennis on June 21st, 2010 @ 10:16 PM

You might have noticed discussions about flash versus HTML5 and it’s a fact that some modern mobile phones have quite solid html + javascript implementations running but no flash player that’s worth speaking of (if any).

Due to the increasing usage of mobile devices the distriburtion of flash gets worse nowadays. That makes the use of javascript for application (and game) development more and more attractive.

Let’s see, what do we need to develop a basic game?

Graphics and animations
Capture user input (keyboard, mouse)
Sound output
Also good: Save game states to local storage

Javascript has long enough been capable of the first two points, but sound and local storage was a problem. To get sound output with javascript the common practice was to use a hidden flash application to play the sound and control it via javascript.

Now with HTML5 you can control sound natively in the browser and use flash as a fallback for older browsers that don’t support it (like IE6) – Soundmanager2 makes it this way for example.

Same thing could be done with local storage (or a socket): Use HTML5 if available, flash as fallback.

So with more and more javascript applications to come, will this be the future of flash? Enriching old browsers with HTML5 abilities? I’m eager to find out.