Comments on: Opera: Single-minded about widget development

Chief executive Jon von Tetzchner says HTML 5 means Adobe's ubiquitous Flash platform will no longer be necessary for delivering rich media.

[pjk0]

I'm a big fan of Opera and standards, but Tim Berners-Lee has been preaching the web standards gospel for a long time now and most people (including mainstream I.T. workers) don't even know who he is.

The sad fact is that it is always going to be the big-money bigshots that get all the attention and all the media coverage when it comes to web implementations. As Von Tetzchner says, it's all about lock-in, and the big-money players like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe aren't about to give up on their respective efforts to lock us all into their proprietary products/APIs/implementations as long as they see a potential competitive advantage in doing so.

[justgold79]

The guys who created Pixlr (an online photo editor) stated that they use as/flash for bitmap support:

http://twitter.com/pixlr/status/1859929280

[dominicsotirescu]

Browser based UI and animations are possible today and will become even better with HTML 5. See image filters applied in real time using the latest versions of Firefox and Safari and object transformations, like rotation, implemented through CSS.

Native browser video support is also coming, eliminating another reason to use Flash. Using Flash for video playback is more cumbersome due to the need to convert to a Flash format before playback.

[da cyka]

nope. no need to convert to flash format. as of v 9.0 of flash player, it supports mpeg-4 with H.264 codec. I don't see native video support in browsers anytime soon since I bet Microsoft browsers will only support WMV and Apple browsers will only support QuickTime. At least with Flash player, you can insure 99% delivery on Linux, OSX and Windows.

[Len Bullard]

"I'm a big fan of Opera and standards, but Tim Berners-Lee has been preaching the web standards gospel for a long time now and most people (including mainstream I.T. workers) don't even know who he is."

Ironic since it was Tim who first punched the big hole in standards by insisting on homegrown HTML and a self-run consortia back when such things actually mattered. It is always the case that standards are always made better by adding a little local secret sauce to make up for the 'glacial pace of standards organizations', or at least, that will be the story until the shoe shifts feet. It worked for Tim and company back when ISO was The Establishment and they were the upstarts. Now it is the W3C's time to be the whipping boy as WHAT demonstrated.

I sincerely doubt Adobe is worrying about HTML5 yet. The joy of having full control over the codebase is that it takes very little time and people to add an extra feature that is 'got to have'.

Standards only matter when they apply to the other guy's product and your guys have to use it. I'm for standards. I'm dubious when dismissing Microsoft from the browser competition, incentivizing insurrections (see ODF) and insisting on starting the conversation by marginalizing the incumbent (say Adobe) are the opening moves. It devolves to Spy vs Spy fast and what we get is the very fragmentation mentioned.

The web is meant to be fragmented. OTW, it would die.

[pjk0]

Len, it's rather ironic that you mention "incentivizing insurrections" re: the ODF debacle, since it was Microsoft who was caught several times stacking the deck by either busing in "grassroots supporters" to manipulate the vote/debate, or (in time-honored MS fashion) paying people to write "unsolicited" articles or letters-to-the editor in support of Microsoft's technology initiatives.

Re: some corporate "secret sauce" - there's nothing wrong with contributing your proprietary technology to a standard, and in some cases even protecting your IP somewhat. However you cross the line when you start expecting the whole world to pay you a license-fee to use an "open standard", or in the case of Adobe/Microsoft/etc, expecting to foist a completely closed, undocumented API on the world that you have SOLE control over, that no one has any input on, no one can see the code, no one can write an alternate implementation, etc.

I don't have to explain what things would have been like if we had 5 different competing wireless networking protocols. Many companies contribute "secret sauce" to open-standards without expecting lock-in and royalties on every user. Netscape for example developed javascript (now immortalized as ECMAscript) and SSL, but isn't making a royalty from every browser user out there. Etc.

[Efrow]

Go Opera!!! I've been using it since 3.6 and it's still the best choice for me. No other browser does mouse shortcuts better.