> “We believe that the native browser experience is the best reading experience for documents” as opposed to Flash, which requires duplicating browser functionality inside a browser, Friedman said. Scribd users will get such functionalities as search, zoom, and scrolling via HTML5, he said.
>
> “Previously, the Flash application needed to provide all that functionality itself, which meant that users had to learn and work with a whole new interface in order to manipulate what they were reading,” said Friedman.
>
> While Scribd is primarily a consumer site, it does have an enterprise business following, with uses like the downloading of business documents and document-sharing. “Scribd is the largest social publishing and reading site on the Web,” Friedman said.
>
> Documents on Scribd will be Apple iPad-friendly. Users will be able to read Scribd documents on handheld devices via HTML5.
via [macworld.com](http://www.macworld.com/article/151084/2010/05/sribd_html5.html?lsrc=rss_main)
I asked before how long it would take sites to go from Flash only, to Flash on the Desktop and alternate version in HTML5 on the iPad, to just HTML5 for both.
Looks like the answer was a little over a month, at least for the first couple of sites. Expect an accelerating trend.
So now someone will have to create a graph showing the decline of IE vs. the decline of Flash. I can’t wait to see which one falls below 20% first.
The reason why Apple is winning this fight, by the way, has nothing to do with monopolies. Apple is just playing the game better. Rather than forcing people to make sites in a special way that would only work on the iPhone or iPad, they gave everyone an easy alternative (HTML5) that works everywhere. It’s the multi-platform “open specification” that Adobe claims Flash is. Write once, run everywhere.
And HTML5 actually works everywhere. Unlike Flash, which is still absent on all mobile devices, not just Apple’s.
At the end of the day, the fault for Flash’s demise will rest entirely with Adobe, because they couldn’t get their code in order three years ago, and because they lacked the vision to see mobile coming. They thought they had the desktop locked up, and that’s all that would matter. Hubris. Plain and simple.
