Are you ready for the end of Flash era?

ShockWave Flash (SWF), briefly called "flash" is one of the most popular technologies in use today on the Internet. It was defined about 1993 by a startup software company FutureWave Software and is very suitable for scalar and vector graphics, multimedia (animations), interactivity through ActionScript, etc. SWF quickly penetrated Internet because it is optimized for slow traffic, which was common in the early 90s, playback software (flash player) is small in size and is easily integrated into browsers. In 1996 FutureWave Software was acquired by Micromedia, which lead to Flash's current popularity, and in 2005 Micromedia itself became a property of the giant Adobe, which further enhanced SWF and it starting to be used widely not only as a file format for videos but also as an universal tool for web design and even software applications that do not require Internet. SWF is now used for playing videos, for banners, games, widgets and entire websites that do not fall back in functionality to anything of modern web technologies.

ShockWave Flash is the standard for beautiful graphics, diverse functionality and great interactivity. One of the three most popular website in the world - Youtube, is relying entirely on flash video, to show its main contents. Another contribution to its popularity is the fact that the use of "flash" applications is totaly free for consumers and as shown by a recent study 99% of Internet users have Adobe Flash Player installed in their browsers.

From the developers' and designers' point of view, however, things do not look so nice. Almost all development tools for flash are paid, and furthermore, the creation of SWF files up to 2008 was hampered by licensing restrictions. The optimization of SWF files by minimizing their size, which was a huge advantage in the 90s, gradually became a disadvantage because their "closed" code did not allow edits. Meanwhile a variety of development platforms were created for other popular technologies in web design and programming, such as Java, Javascript, PHP, ASP, which are typically free or even open source. Moreover, their file formats, without Java, are text but not compiled, "closed" type, allowing easy editing. For websites that are maintained by different teams of programmers and designers, this is of great advantage.

The disadvantages above, however, can not threaten the dominant position of the SWF, but may rather facilitate the alternatives of flash, gaining strength in the recent years.

The first serious blow for Adobe and SWF came by the publication of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for HTML 5, whereby compatible with HTML 5 browsers must be able to show videos without using external applications (Adobe Flash Player is the external application to the browser). This W3C is trying to give more popularity to file formats such as OGG and H.264 for example, are not protected by patents, but penalizes those who are, Adobe Flash Player at first place.

The next trouble for Adobe came from Steve Jobs, who announced that the iPad, and iPhone will not support flash. His motives are unclear, but the results are there - the fast-growing market of portable devices is prohibited for the popular Adobe Flash Player.

In my opinion, the biggest trouble for the SWF will be the one that Microsoft will make. The creators of the most popular browser said that its next version - Internet Explorer 9, will support Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) .

What is SVG? This is a technology that is smilar to SWF not only in its abbreviation, but also in large part of the functionalities. Its specification was created in 1999 by the W3C and included support of vector and raster graphics and interactivity through JavaScript, a language related to ActionScript. SVG should also support animations, but I have never been able to see this, because I have not come across a browser that has implemented this part of the specification. It is suitable for much more complex things such as this version of a popular game for Windows ( If your browser is Internet Explorer you may have troubles opening the page). The most pleasant part of SVG, however, is the text format of files, which allows easy generation and editing, as opposed to the closed form of Flash.

SVG is a true alternative of Flash. Apart from multimedia capabilities, it has all the other strengths of the SWF, in addition, there are no patent restrictions and even its object model can be handled through the DOM of the webpage in some browsers. SVG already achieved small victories, such as the penetration in the vector graphics market of the open source program Inkscape, that uses it, in the competition of established products such as Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator. SVG is a file format that no program for vector graphics can afford not to maintain anymore. I think it will start to move and Flash on the web. Simplicity, which generate svg files it will need in applications that require dynamic generation of objects with dependent design, graphics, interactive maps, etc.

Will Flash disappear from websites? Of course not, but we can expect that its alternatives will gradually take increasingly larger parts of its usage share and another dinosaur era in Internet technology will pass.