SlideShare dumps Adobe Flash and adopts HTML5

Is this the beginning of the end for Adobe Flash? SlideShare thinks it is

Flash has had its day. But now it's time to move on.

"Flash used to be the 'Great Unifier' the common denominator of all browsers and worked quite well," said Jon Boutelle, CTO of SlideShare, in an interview with me  at the Twitter Front End Summit."

Boutelle was referring to the decision announced by San Francisco-based SlideShare late Tuesday at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference that it has switched over from Adobe Flash and now fully runs its site on the HTML5 platform. 

Co-founded by husband and wife team in 2008, Jonathan Boutelle, CTO, and Rashmi Sinha, CEO, this site gets some serious mileage. With over 60 million users, 120 million pageviews, SlideShare, which has raised $3 million in funding from onathan Abrams, Mark Cuban, Dave McClure, and Venrock, is among the most visited 200 websites in the world, with users uploading tens of thousands of professional presentations every day. So why disrupt a good thing?

Why would a company take such a dramatic stand and turns its back on millions of users heavily relying on Flash? Well, the answer is simple and not so. 

Flash worked well, explained Boutelle. But then came Apple. 

"Then came along the iPhone, and the iPad and it [Flash Adobe] didn't work quite as well. Suddenly a product could work wonderfully, even better, without Flash," Boutelle said. "See the humongous success of the iPad and the iPad. We don't need Flash any longer, so we decided to ditch Flash."

Boutelle admitted, during our talk, to being a  "Apple whore," and that he believes that in time Flash will become "obsolete," and slowly disappear all-together. He added, "It will not be a great loss. HTML5 is far superior."

But let's backtrack for a moment and start from the beginning.

What is HTML5 and what is the difference between it and Flash? Flash requires an Adobe plugin and HTML5 runs on HTML and requires no plugin. HTML5 is a major revision of the HTML standard, which is a markup language designed to represent web content in a structured manner. Flash is a binary format for multimedia content using ActionScript.

It is important to note that Flash Player 10 is estimated to be present in more than 98% of Internet connected computers in the US and Canada.

But what does it all means for SlideShares' users? "It simply means that the site will run better," Boutelle said.

For starter, a site that runs 30% faster, files that take 40 percent less space than they used to, and presentations are viewable on all mobile devices, from iPad to iPhone to Android devices.

It also means for SlideShare that a tremendous amount of work went into this transition, and it's not over.

"Our entire team of 50 engineers spent the last six months preparing for this transition," he said, "The work is not completed and the next few weeks we will be transferring our entire catalogue, five years worth of material will be transferred to HTML5. Everything."

There are many developers who do not share Boutelle's gloom and doom vision of the future for Flash Adobe, and who have conducted in-depth testing with conclusion far different than his. Jan Ozer stated in his report, "At least from a CPU utilization perspective, Flash isn't bad and HTML5 isn't good. It all depends upon the platform and implementation."

Boutelle believes that it's the war of the titans, pitting Apple against Adobe. And he believes “Apple is winning that one."