Comments on Sam Johnston: Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than ...

Incidentally you're right, it is "so outd...

2012-01-04T11:27:41.962+01:00

Incidentally you're right, it is "so outdated"... here's the update:

RIP Adobe Flash (1996-2011) - now let's bury the dead

"22 FEBRUARY 2009"

2012-01-04T11:25:53.057+01:00

"22 FEBRUARY 2009"

This information is so outdated...

2012-01-04T11:10:37.457+01:00

This information is so outdated...

We need a universal embed-able flash video player....

2011-07-05T16:50:35.966+02:00

We need a universal embed-able flash video player. It would be possible if someone reverse engineer all the flash players out there. Anyone?

Nice to see that all you're theories have fall...

2011-04-24T14:14:07.503+02:00

Nice to see that all you're theories have fall into pieces...
Nice to see that people like you earns money in speculating... and changing the vision of things... so hardly.

So yes not 99% but let's talk about important things. Let's talk about the possibilities of Flash Tech. Today we could see how the FP11 will run in PC's. And how will it open markets. Game markets. So do not bother if the stats are wrong but if the thing for itlsef is important and will change anything. Ahhh update to you Firefox 4 will have built-in FP11 as Google Chrome have. Please spent a little more time doing investigation. And less time jerking of with your so called expertise in technology...

So are you responsible for the tag war between Ch...

2011-03-22T17:46:25.645+01:00

So are you responsible for the tag war between Chrome and Safari/IE, or is that the W3C invited expert in charge of cross-browser compatibility? HTML has and will always encounter the issue of browsers squaring off for economic reasons and selectively choosing what to implement and how to implement it. Just look at WebGL, but not on IE, because it won't work there. The plugin system in general, which includes Unity and Java as well as Flash, will not go away because some developers and content creators will always want the assurance that their content will be viewable on all devices.

Intersting views but you're only focusing on v...

2010-12-13T14:03:25.255+01:00

Intersting views but you're only focusing on video. Flash is perfect for delivering complex, engaging, emmersive vector animation at tiny file sizes. Web advertising (which the web was built on after porn) would be in a sorry state without flash.

used in the right context for the right purpose, Flash is a great tool. Same for HTML 5

By the look of you own website, i can see that you...

2010-11-11T13:52:16.008+01:00

By the look of you own website, i can see that you do not really care about how a website looks...

"same size" -> "sample size"...

2010-02-24T22:16:09.199+01:00

"same size" -> "sample size"

The methodology section is interesting (the same s...

2010-02-24T20:48:17.604+01:00

The methodology section is interesting (the same size is small, etc.) but the sample questionnaire is REALLY interesting:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/samplesurvey/

Let's suppose you or I were trying to determine Flash penetration -- would we (a) start by sending users to a page with an embedded flash in it than will -- on most browsers -- cause a "do you want to install this plugin" dialog to appear along with instructions NOT to install the plugin, and then send the users through multiple similar screens each testing for ONE version of Flash, or would we just silently test for Flash and send the results back to our server?

I doubt most subjects would read the THIRD PARAGRAPH of text before they installed the plugin, so the survey distorts its own results. It's obviously intended to create its own numbers.

Haha! Fail.

2009-10-28T21:12:50.696+01:00

Haha! Fail.

How Does "99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops ...

2009-09-24T18:30:28.025+02:00

How Does "99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets" = "Flash content reaches 99.0% of Internet viewers"?

you are seriously putting a huge spin on the words...are you a politician?

Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets...how ...

2009-09-24T18:26:09.715+02:00

Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets...how is that stating mobile...I cant even get through the rest of your post.

you are a hater...and believe me...its only just begun...twighlight my ass!

Actually no, I don't have to provide anything ...

2009-07-03T02:58:34.393+02:00

Actually no, I don't have to provide anything but an alternative opinion and talking point. Adobe's numbers are complete and utter BS so long as they conveniently ignore the mobile web (and likely a lot of the netbook/smartbook/etc. devices too) and that's before you start drilling down to things like quoting numbers with a 5% margin of error to decimal places. And seriously, wtf are "Worldwide Ubiquity" figures anyway? Either you're ubiquitous or you're not...

Flash is in its twilight period - it's been fun while it's lasted but I for one won't be losing too much sleep over it.

Sam

Clearly you have a huge issue with your methodol...

2009-07-03T02:36:32.984+02:00

Clearly you have a huge issue with *your* methodology. What the heck is this:

"1 billion PCs + 1 billion mobiles = 2 billion out of 4 billion total = 50%"

You already admitted that you don't know many of the 4 billion phones are internet-enabled. What if it's around 1 billion? It's probably not far off IMO considering that all internet-enabled Nokia phones for example run Flash Lite. The 14 million iPhones + Android phones is only 0.7% of this 2 billion. We're still close to 99% then. For your conclusion to have any validity, you'll have to provide some evidence that internet-enabled mobile phones are significantly greater than 1 billion. Otherwise, you're just trolling.

Also, I think you've missed the point about Adobe having to support x86/x64/ARM/MIPS. They don't plan to - they want others to do it for them. That's what the Open Screen Project and publishing the SWF spec is all about. It's already working for them:

http://ostatic.com/blog/bsquare-has-an-adobe-flash-browser-plug-in-for-android-devices

Great post! Thanks for posted this...

2009-06-11T14:51:32.957+02:00

Great post! Thanks for posted this...

Actually I'm more of an observer/tester than an ac...

2009-04-13T20:39:00.000+02:00

Actually I'm more of an observer/tester than an active participant... there's no conflict there. Regardless of HTML 5 hitting the mainstream a number of browsers (Safari 4, Firefox 3.1, etc.) are already adding VIDEO support and that's all that matters - it's easy enough to detect the browser and act accordingly depending on what it is.

Sam

Motive: "I'm a W3C Invited Expert in the HTML 5 wo...

2009-04-13T20:20:00.000+02:00

Motive: "I'm a W3C Invited Expert in the HTML 5 working group"

HTML 5 is years away from being as widely installed as Flash. For the ivory tower set, it sounds great, but for those of us actually developing web pages for the masses, it's just not a realistic approach.

Ok let's be honest though, the quality of flash vi...

2009-03-06T15:22:00.000+01:00

Ok let's be honest though, the quality of flash video is regularly appalling, certainly no worse than Ogg at the same bitrates. It's improved somewhat recently, for example with YouTube serving up both LQ FLV versions and HQ H.264 versions, but that already involves storing multiple formats.

In my opinion for most use cases (e.g. 99.9% of YouTube) Ogg would do fine and for the rest (e.g. full screen HD Netflix movies) people are happy to install a dedicated client, flash, silverlight, or whatever to get at the content. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem - with more Ogg content there will be wider support and more performance enhancement, and it's very hard to present an argument that proprietary codecs are "better for the web" than open ones... aside from the GIF patents, images on the internet are relatively unencumbered and there was a time when the maths involved was considered as complex as video codecs are today.

Thanks for the comprehensive feedback - it'll be interesting to see how this all pans out.

Sam

PS Adobe have a lot of work to do on the cross platform issues - this will be both an important and difficult battle for them.

Anonymous: "All it takes is an app like YouTube to...

2009-02-26T04:42:00.000+01:00

Anonymous: "All it takes is an app like YouTube to completely change that, literally overnight. As of right now, let's be honest, Flash's success is due to 1 thing: video streaming."

It was Flash that made YouTube a huge success, not YouTube that made Flash a success. As Flash Player 5 had a high-90’s (97? 98?) penetration and this was before video had been introduced in Flash Player 6. Web video took off because everyone already had the Flash Player, which reduced the barrier to users. Meanwhile content providers liked being able to have a custom controls that worked into the webpage rather than being forced to use the plugin's controls, which was often branded by the video company, rather than being branded by the content provider. YouTube was able to get a huge audience because everyone already had Flash.

Anonymous: "If I'm creating a "Rich Internet Application", and the user isn't willing to install a ~5MB runtime, chances are my app isn't that "Rich" at all."

If you're website is running a plugin that people have to install, you are going to lose some of your audience. Or what people often refer to as a drop off rate. The question is not whether or not it will happen, the question is how big or low that percentage number is. That's why few companies start using the latest version of the Flash Player until it's over 90% of their audience, as that drop off rate means lost revenue from a smaller audience.

Sam Johnston: "That may be so but Adobe have a hard enough time currently keeping up with a small handful of hardware/software combinations - with x86/x64/ARM/MIPS netbooks running a myriad operating systems it's going to get a *lot* harder... and that's without even thinking about how to keep it all secure."

Well, Adobe has beening doing a good job with x86, they have an alpha version for Linux x64 (Windows and OS X on it's way), they a deal with ARM for their chips and deal with Sigma Designs to optimize Flash for MIPS chips. There are also deals with Intel and Broadcom to bring Flash to chipsets included in televisions or top-sets that will connect televisions to the internet.

Can you think of another chipset? Then google it and Adobe Flash to see if it will also be included in the Open Screen project. If it's missing, it may still be in the works as the Open Screen Project isn't even a year old yet.

Quite frankly there are so many companies and different chipsets involved now that it's hard to keep track of them all. Adobe would benefit to group them all together in a massive list rather than have them spread out in all sorts of announcements and press releases.

See the thing is that Flash is used so much through out the web, that any device with web access and without Flash is missing a lot of content and a lot of video. So it seems that many companies want to work with Adobe on the Open Screen Project, so that they can include "Flash Player" as one of the features in the device."

"Also, the codecs need not necessarily be common as the sites could decide what to serve up depending on the user agent (eg Ogg vs H.264 vs Flash). If you saw "Safari on OS X" for example you could serve up a VIDEO tag with H.264 (or any other QuickTime supported codec) and if you saw "Firefox 3.1" on anything you could serve up a VIDEO tag with Ogg Theora."

So for Safari OS X users, the solution for the so called "open web" is to use the Quicktime plugin?

Meanwhile, personally as Firefox user, it would suck to be left with the low-quality Ogg video and have to switch to another browser for the high-quality h.264 with Quicktime or Flash. Not exactly a user-friendly solution. Also will Ogg video in Firefox or any other browser include full-screen video, or hardware acceleration, multicore support (for those who have newer computers) or any of the latest video features found with Flash? That's the problem with Ogg, is that it's already a step back compared to what's already available in Flash and is still years away from getting proper support.

Beyond those who want to promote open codex, I don't think many content providers or even users are going to want to use Ogg.

Sam Johnston:"Agreed, had VIDEO appeared in HTML 4 Flash would definitely not have had a look in for many (most?) users."

If early browsers had gotten over the video codecs issues (once again, I doubt Microsoft would have done so in IE with them pushing Windows Media Player) and it had worked, then I fear we would still be using old codecs from 2001 in order to support IE 6 users. Once again, we would be missing out on full-screen video and all the other advances that have come with video inside of the Flash Player.

@AC: Agreed, had VIDEO appeared in HTML 4 Flash wo...

2009-02-24T14:53:00.000+01:00

@AC: Agreed, had VIDEO appeared in HTML 4 Flash would definitely not have had a look in for many (most?) users.

@Stefan Richter: About 5% of my visitors don't have Flash, but then again less then 15% of them use IE so this is not your average audience. Turning away 1 in 20 visitors is more than enough enough for me to think twice about Flash content.

As at today around 1 in 5 (20%) of my visitors *already* support HTML 5 video, either via WebKit/Safari or via Firefox 3.1 beta.

More than half of them use up-to-date Firefox versions - a huge 90% of them are on the latest versions (3.0.5/6 or 3.1) so shortly after 3.1 drops this should crack 50%.

@Steve: As above, 20% of my visitors already have at least a subset of HTML 5 features. According to RIA stats that's about the same as Silverlight (and that already seems a bit generous - the only time I've ever used Silverlight was to stream Netflix on my MacBook).

HTML5? Isn't that about as ubiquitous as Silverlig...

2009-02-24T13:23:00.000+01:00

HTML5? Isn't that about as ubiquitous as Silverlight?

What an entertaining read. I'm not quite sure what...

2009-02-24T09:55:00.000+01:00

What an entertaining read. I'm not quite sure what your argument is - are you saying that half of your website visitors don't have Flash installed? Surely not.

Overall, blanket statistics are not much use. They are not much use from Adobe, and have even less use after you have tried to discredit them.

Each project, each website needs to evaluate the market they are targeting. What is YOUR demographic? Is Flash a viable technology to deliver [insert your content here]?
On the consumer internet today Flash is clearly everywhere and you make yourself look very silly trying to tell us otherwise. It may be a different story inside a corporate LAN. Or maybe you target only Blackberries (not sure why you would) then Flash may not be the best technology for you (would HTML 5 be though?).

When a client comes to me asking for a Flash app I will look at *their* user data, not Adobe's. What do I find: statistics that are in line with those that Adobe publishes (ie Flash Player 10 at roughly 55% right now).

Sam, why don't you publish the Flash Player stats for your blog and let us discuss those? Yeah, thought not.

I will bookmark this blog post and come back to it in 2 years from now. I predict now that HTML5 will be nowhere, and that 80% of web video will still be Flash. Will you bet against it?

Forget about penetration and let's talk about the ...

2009-02-24T07:26:00.000+01:00

Forget about penetration and let's talk about the bastardization of JavaScript that is "ActionScript". From a software developer standpoint, Flash is everything but enticing. If Adobe thinks they are going to make every programmer learn their proprietary butchering of JavaScript, then they likely have some bad news ahead of them. Sure, the "designer" people who have been using Adobe tools for years will evangelize, and they might even be able to hack up spaghetti code to build some proof of concept eye candy. But how about the TONS of *developers and engineers* who cringe at the thought of using this technology for their entire application? This plays a HUGE part in the decision of a platform. If they want the support of the world of computer scientists and software engineers, they better figure out a way to satisfy these people.

Penetration stats are basically meaningless in my opinion, it's just a pissing match between the vendors. Now, platform support is not meaningless. But as long as the VM runs on the major OS's and hardware, the percentage of devices running the software at any given time isn't all that important. All it takes is an app like YouTube to completely change that, literally overnight. As of right now, let's be honest, Flash's success is due to 1 thing: video streaming.

If I'm creating a "Rich Internet Application", and the user isn't willing to install a ~5MB runtime, chances are my app isn't that "Rich" at all. The reality is, if your app is killer, people will install it. If I can watch some lady stomp grapes and fall on her head, I'm definitely willing to install your runtime. Hence youtube success!

@David: The next wave of netbooks will be far more...

2009-02-24T04:25:00.000+01:00

@David: The next wave of netbooks will be far more difficult to kit out and maintain now that we are moving away from WinTel.

@Unreality: Mobile vs Desktop browsing is rapidly trending upward and it's anyone's guess as to where/when it will plateau out.

@Anonymous Coward: iPhone users have YouTube without Flash. The claim that "Flash content reaches 99% of Internet viewers" is bunk - we're just not sure how far wrong it is.

@Matthew: That may be so but Adobe have a hard enough time currently keeping up with a small handful of hardware/software combinations - with x86/x64/ARM/MIPS netbooks running a myriad operating systems it's going to get a *lot* harder... and that's without even thinking about how to keep it all secure.

Also, the codecs need not necessarily be common as the sites could decide what to serve up depending on the user agent (eg Ogg vs H.264 vs Flash). If you saw "Safari on OS X" for example you could serve up a VIDEO tag with H.264 (or any other QuickTime supported codec) and if you saw "Firefox 3.1" on anything you could serve up a VIDEO tag with Ogg Theora.

Comments on Sam Johnston: Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than ...

Incidentally you're right, it is "so outd...

"22 FEBRUARY 2009"

This information is so outdated...

We need a universal embed-able flash video player....

Nice to see that all you're theories have fall...

So are you responsible for the tag war between Ch...

Intersting views but you're only focusing on v...

By the look of you own website, i can see that you...

"same size" -> "sample size"...

The methodology section is interesting (the same s...

Haha! Fail.

How Does "99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops ...

Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets...how ...

Actually no, I don't have to provide anything ...

Clearly you have a huge issue with *your* methodol...

Great post! Thanks for posted this...

Actually I'm more of an observer/tester than an ac...

Motive: "I'm a W3C Invited Expert in the HTML 5 wo...

Ok let's be honest though, the quality of flash vi...

Anonymous: "All it takes is an app like YouTube to...

@AC: Agreed, had VIDEO appeared in HTML 4 Flash wo...

HTML5? Isn't that about as ubiquitous as Silverlig...

What an entertaining read. I'm not quite sure what...

Forget about penetration and let's talk about the ...

@David: The next wave of netbooks will be far more...

Clearly you have a huge issue with your methodol...