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I still used Grooveshark when you guys moved from Flash to HTML5, despite it being a less enjoyable experience. But, when the AIR app became just a wrapper for

I still used Grooveshark when you guys moved from Flash to HTML5, despite it being a less enjoyable experience. But, when the AIR app became just a wrapper for the HTML5 site, I cancelled my subscription. It seems like a lot of work went into switching, considering the functionality is still the same as the Flash version. Did any good come out of switching to HTML5?

cowpewter 15y ago
Hmm... Upsides: It's easier to integrate ads and other third-party content like Facebook like buttons/comments, Youtube videos, etc. Unless you want to destroy Flash's performance by using a wmode other than window, there is no way to mix flash and html/iframe content. I'm pretty sure most people's hatred of Flash comes from ads that are not only annoying and poorly coded, but embedded with opaque or transparent. Then they will melt your laptop, yes. It's easier to hire for, HTML/CSS/JS are more common skills than AS, especially when you're not hiring to do 'push movieclip around' Flash, but working inside a huge Flex app with 90% custom in-house components. It's also easier to find people who might not have a lot of development experience but are good at pushing around html and css to finetune the interface to our designers' desires. Maybe that got easier in Flex in Flex 4 with the Spark components, but we weren't allowed to drop support for Flash 9 despite it being less than 1% of visitors, so we were still on Flex 3. Downsides: Performance. Holy crap performance. The flash site still ran well in ancient browsers like IE6 and IE7. The new site struggles in IE7 and we had to drop support for IE6 entirely (performance was not the only reason there but, you know). And on the subject of mobile, the flash site was sluggish but technically worked on my Nokia N800 tablet running Maemo. New site doesn't. We're working on making this better, of course, but the new site was written pretty quickly and accumulated a ton of technical debt, mostly in the form of poor performance tradeoffs. Stability. Ditto what I just said about IE6 and IE7. And now throw Opera in there too. jQuery eases a lot of cross-browser pain, but not all of it. The edge cases in which Flash behaves differently on different platforms are just that, edge cases, and usually occur when you have to cross the boundary into JS. So now instead of basically one platform to test your code on you have...well all the major browsers * all the major OSs. Maintainability. When your application is pushing the 100k LOC mark, strict typing is a godsend. So are real namespaces, and interfaces. It is very very easy to write stupid code in JS. You can write stupid code in any language, of course, but at least in Flash the compiler will yell at you if it's blatantly incorrect, and exceptions throw useful stack traces on all platforms. I don't know what it is about JS and swallowing errors, but sometimes it's a battle just to figure out where in the code you need to even start looking for the error. Or that an exception even occurred. I guess I should make a blog post about the switch someday...
- magicalhobo 15y ago
  Detailed and realistic, thank you. And I agree, you should make a blog post about it.

cowpewter 15y ago

Hmm... Upsides: It's easier to integrate ads and other third-party content like Facebook like buttons/comments, Youtube videos, etc. Unless you want to destroy Flash's performance by using a wmode other than window, there is no way to mix flash and html/iframe content. I'm pretty sure most people's hatred of Flash comes from ads that are not only annoying and poorly coded, but embedded with opaque or transparent. Then they will melt your laptop, yes. It's easier to hire for, HTML/CSS/JS are more common skills than AS, especially when you're not hiring to do 'push movieclip around' Flash, but working inside a huge Flex app with 90% custom in-house components. It's also easier to find people who might not have a lot of development experience but are good at pushing around html and css to finetune the interface to our designers' desires. Maybe that got easier in Flex in Flex 4 with the Spark components, but we weren't allowed to drop support for Flash 9 despite it being less than 1% of visitors, so we were still on Flex 3. Downsides: Performance. Holy crap performance. The flash site still ran well in ancient browsers like IE6 and IE7. The new site struggles in IE7 and we had to drop support for IE6 entirely (performance was not the only reason there but, you know). And on the subject of mobile, the flash site was sluggish but technically worked on my Nokia N800 tablet running Maemo. New site doesn't. We're working on making this better, of course, but the new site was written pretty quickly and accumulated a ton of technical debt, mostly in the form of poor performance tradeoffs. Stability. Ditto what I just said about IE6 and IE7. And now throw Opera in there too. jQuery eases a lot of cross-browser pain, but not all of it. The edge cases in which Flash behaves differently on different platforms are just that, edge cases, and usually occur when you have to cross the boundary into JS. So now instead of basically one platform to test your code on you have...well all the major browsers * all the major OSs. Maintainability. When your application is pushing the 100k LOC mark, strict typing is a godsend. So are real namespaces, and interfaces. It is very very easy to write stupid code in JS. You can write stupid code in any language, of course, but at least in Flash the compiler will yell at you if it's blatantly incorrect, and exceptions throw useful stack traces on all platforms. I don't know what it is about JS and swallowing errors, but sometimes it's a battle just to figure out where in the code you need to even start looking for the error. Or that an exception even occurred. I guess I should make a blog post about the switch someday...

magicalhobo 15y ago
Detailed and realistic, thank you. And I agree, you should make a blog post about it.