Thursday, May 6, 2010

Scribd to go HTML5, Abandon Flash

Adobe's Flash has taken another beating at the hands of standards: online document sharing site Scribd is going HTML5. Scribd's co-founder and Chief Technological Officer could not make the company's position more clear that the switch is based on technical and not merely political reasoning: "We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a web page." (For clarity in parsing those links, the Jared Friedman quote is from Schonfeld's article at TechCrunch.)

Scribd joins Google (YouTube HTML5 beta here), Apple, Microsoft (which moved from merely sending video to iPhones in H.264 to declaring "The future of the web is HTML5"), Virgin America, and a variety of other content providers in leveraging new standards to provide a full-featured alternative to historically buggy and insecure proprietary plug-ins like Flash.

Apple is still winning the Flash chicken.

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