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| Study Shows 98% Of Browsers Compatible With Flash |
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posted by Editor on Wednesday September 18, @04:16PM
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Greg Weiss writes: "According to this survey posted by Macromedia, 97.8% of Web users can experience Flash content without having to download and install a player. If so, Flash has clearly succeeded in parlaying itself from one of a dozen vector-based formats to a 'must-have' format used by mainstream Web advertisers. The interesting question is whether Macromedia can parlay the marketshare of its animation plugin (and the complementary authoring tools that are critical in promoting Flash adoption) into a successful alternative to Microsoft in the video streaming arena, which is currently fragmented between Microsoft MediaPlayer, RealPlayer, and Apple's QuickTime. Also, now that Microsoft has pretty much killed Java as a cross-platform, client-side application competitor, Flash has taken over the role of the 'pretty GUI applet' format for the Web, and is now pretty much sufficient to build full-fledged application Web-based UIs with sliders, buttons, etc."
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"I'm not sure how flexible the "back-end" of the Flash application platform is, (there is a scripting engine called ActionScript that Flash hooks into which can speak XML and other buzzwords), but features in that direction could further extend Flash into the web application space. However, Macromedia seems to be avoiding any significant positioning of itself as a developer-oriented toolset, targeting instead graphic designers who occasionally get ambitious. This is shrewd, since it helps Macromedia stay off of Microsoft's radar. Still, the potential is there, say, with a Sun acquisition; (possible given a Macromedia market cap of ~$500 million.) Frankly, though, a loudmouth Sun controlling Flash might hurt the platform more than help it."
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by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19, @01:32AM EST (#1)
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say 98% of the Flash "content" on the web is absolute rubbish. The fact that advertisers have jumped all over it just means users are apt to disable it, meaning it won't go much of anywhere in the streaming video market. The only one that's really poised to go anywhere is QuickTime, and that's only because they went with a new standard format (MPEG4).
And as for MS killing Java, it was Sun's baby not Microsoft's. If Sun needed a buy-in from MS, they developed the Java platform in the tradition of the worst dot-bomb mistakes. More accurately, though, Java languished because Sun made promises about it that it couldn't deliver.
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by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19, @10:11AM EST (#2)
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Isn't this pretty much the same numbers as for IE usage on the web. Since flash comes with IE, it shouldn't come as any surprise that flash has a high market penetration...
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I was just wondering about that. Thanks for pointing it out. And, of course, whatever Billy Gates giveth, Billy Gates can take away. Which means their relationship is one of kisser and kissee. Sad.
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As someone mentioned before, the study really does refer to IE, Netscape and AOL browsers having Flash pre-installed. Also note that this paper was published in the year 2000. Quotes were taken in 1999.
Also, by 97.8%, they're also talking about Flash 2. Flash 5 is supposedly 90.2%, Flash 6 is 30.2% according to the (year 2000) survey. Note that as of this posting, September 2002, Flash 5 is the latest version for Linux/Unix. It doesn't have action scripting.
Plus, the study is specifically on 'computers'. They don't look at other embedded devices such as Palm, or Cell phone browsers, or ... whatever... kiosks.
And finally, they seem to pit their technology against, "DHTML, Java". Hmmm.. Not even Real, or Media Player, or Quicktime, not to mention non-proprietary standards such as MPEG1, 2, 4. I'm guessing that the scope of the survey was to convince advertisers to move to flash ads.
I don't mean to bash flash - I think that its a good format. Its just that these surveys... ugh!
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The survey is actually more recent than you noted, not 2000 but June 2002. Here's a nice summary chart that was originally in the article I submitted.
In terms of which version, 90% for the Flash 5 version is pretty remarkable marketshare (I thought before reading all this that they were at 50-60% which is nice but not enough to be considered pragmatically-ubiquitous.) But your point about cell phone browsers is well-taken. My cell phone browser (a Palm-based Treo 180) doesn't support Flash either (nor Java).
The question is: are non-Windows PC markets relevant for the web (today, or eventually)? Eventually, absolutely. Today, the answer is probably no. I'd guess that the market of people accessing the web with cell phones would be less than 3% of the browser market overall though, and probably less than 1% of the market. And while I use Linux (and OpenBSD) myself, I don't consider them relevant on the desktop, for better or worse, and some surveys that have quantified the number of web visitors using Linux put the number at under 1% also. Apple Macintosh browsing percentages according to those same researchers are about 3%.
Of course, Nooface is targetted to look at post-PC interfaces, and I'm also interested in how we get there. I just mention this to as part of my attempt to understand the reality of where we are now.
Regarding Macromedia's positioning (vs DHTML, Java), let me be clear, they aren't positioning themselves as a video player yet. I'm just saying that's possible, based on the technology in Flash 6, particularly if they can move 90% of their installed base to Flash 6 by the beginning of next year as they seem to think they can.
I do wonder if there are any other funny things going on with those marketshare statistics though and would welcome further counter-arguments.
--Greg
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