Flash-free standards-based web video playback is on the way. According to rumors, Google will make its recently-acquired VP8 video codec available as an open source, enabling all web browsers to play web video without licensing issues. The VP8 offers high quality video and has been claimed to provide “50 percent bandwidth savings compared to leading H.264 implementations.” Mozilla and Google are expected to announce plans to implement support for VP8 in their respective browsers. More at NewTeeVee.com.
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Why kill flash?
No really why are people down on flash?
Because they (Google) probably have to pay high licensing fees to use Flash on their websites.
> No really why are people down on flash?
A good question. As with any technology it has pros and cons. The cons I see are: problems with search engines (they can’t index text posted as graphics yet, so it makes it harder to find content on sites), inability to get direct URLs to certain pages, back/forward functionality in browsers works unexpectedly, can’t copy/paste text posted as graphics, prolonged loading of sites, proprietary technology, and mostly disabling good capabilities provided by standards-based HTML. It has pros also, of course… I’ve used it myself when I needed it for specific jobs.
Regarding video, it’d be better to have a format that is not proprietary, can be played on any browser without plugins, and respects all the attributes and capabilities from HTML, so that it can be combined and manipulated with Javascript, etc.
Just my $.02.