“It’s a move that does more than just show what happens to customers when there’s a clash of tech-industry egos,” Clarke reports. “It illustrates the options customers have between picking the closed Flash – or Silverlight from Microsoft – and open technologies such as HTML to serve content to a new generation of mobile computing devices.”
Clarke reports, “Virgin picked HTML to give users of iPhones and other mobiles the option in the future of checking in through their phone. Chief information officer (CTO) Ravi Simhambhatla told The Reg: ‘I don’t want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin].'”
Clarke reports, “Virgin anticipates moving this new site to HTML 5, once it’s cleared standards ratification at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Smart companies don’t exclude potential customers who have the most disposable income. You want to cater to the type of people who buy PCs based on lowest possible sticker price and are much more likely to steal software, music, and movies? Or do you want customers who have been proven to spend money for quality, who understand true value, and who are much more likely to pay for software, music and movies? Your choice.
Please see:
• iPhone owners more likely to pay for digital content – November 26, 2009
• Apple iPhone users buy many more apps, surf the Web much more than other ‘smartphone’ users – March 27, 2009
• NPD: Mac users significantly more likely to pay for music than Windows PC owners [updated] – December 19, 2007
• Study shows iPod owners significantly less likely to steal music than the average person – January 13, 2006
Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dirty Pierre le Punk” for the heads up.]
My only question is how you “dump” something that is being debuted? Isn’t it more like they “designed the site” without Flash?
Shame that our choices are things that are ‘good enough’ to be alternatives to Flash animation, rather than better than. I’d still like to see Flash in a scalable form that either has an alternative means of dealing with mouse-overs (maybe an on-screen pointer with a little area of the screen designated for mouse control, or has mouse-over animations turned off or button or hot-point activated).
For all it’s problems, Flash has its uses and advantages, and there’s a whole host of valuable legacy content that will never be remade in HTML or some other animator.
Slow and painful pin pricks that draw little blood.
However, the blood is straying to flow for flash. Adobe should start investing heavy in their software products, let flash go!
More blood from Apples multitouch iPhone!
It starts with a trickle
HTML5 video from YouTube etc looks like total crap in my Safari browser. It’s worse than Flash. Somehow, Firefox manages to play both just fine. I really don’t care for Firefox though.
Click on the map on the home page. It’s a Flash map. Try harder!
Shame there aren’t more Virgins around.
Yet another great waste of advertising dollars. This is almost as dumb as Sony advertising the Vaio on MDN last summer. Look to the right on the MDN page and you’ll see a Google Nexus 1 ad. (…. ?!) If you don’t see it, just refresh a couple of times, it’ll show. Amazing…..
Bookmarked on Safari and all my other browsers! FLASH FREE. Good job Virgin America!
I would say a good thing to do here would to be, if you want to browse Virgin America’s website, do it through your iPhone. Let’s show support to VA in making this move buy giving it our web traffic. You know people are looking at the web stats of who visited their page and with what browser/OS. Let’s thank them for making the right/smart decision.
Safari runs like a dog on my Mac if I have more than a few sites open – I get spinning beachballs so frequently I tear my hair out sometimes… Inevitably I get a message saying that a flash script is causing problems and do I want to stop it…
I use Adobe products for film editing (in addition to Final Cut Pro). Apart from the non-Apple user interface and the cluttered screens, Adobe products seem to take forever to install, forever to load and consume resources like no other apps. If I could replace Adobe altogether I would – and one day I am sure I will be able to. I look forward to that day with the same anticipation as the day I ditched Office for iWork…
Now if only iChat supported MSN with video…
@MDN Take
Not all Windows PC users steal software, music, and movies. Nor do all Mac users pay for software, music and movies.
I love Macs and other Apple products, although they do have flaws and can always be improved. But the snarky elitism in some of the MDN Takes has gotten more than a bit old. Frankly, it smacks of the mindless fanaticism that gives Apple products a bad name in some circles.
I have switched a number of people to Macs by letting the Mac speak for itself. I don’t force Macs on people because the Mac is not for everyone. Long time Windows users have to be interested and willing to adapt before they are good candidates. One bad experience from someone pushed into buying a Mac can turn dozens of potential switchers away.
It took my mother-in-law thirteen years to switch, during which time I helped her to purchase several PCs. A couple of years ago she came to me, pointed to my 24″ iMac and said, “I want one of those!” She has been much happier since then.
what moremac said
http://www.virginamerica.com/va/travelInfo.do?pageName=routemap&rightBar=routemap_right_bar
It starts with a squirt…
KingMel,
You’re taking MDN take literally. The point they’re trying to make is that average disposable income of a Mac user is significantly higher than average disposable income of a Windows user. Also, average percentage of paid vs. pirated music, movies and software on a Mac is significantly higher than on a Windows computer. Nowhere did MDN say that all PC users steal music and software, and are dirt poor, nor did they say that every Mac user is filthy rich (I only wish!).
Making a Mac-compatible (and now iPhone-compatible) web content is a very smart investment. While the absolute user base of the platform still has to approach 10% (even in the US, not to mention globally), the relative value of those Mac users to online businesses is significantly higher than their actual market share. For that reason, any smart business should be smart enough to invest in re-engineering their web content for best performance on Apple devices.
Above like Microsoft have for to long have been listening to the wrong people, have lacked under the hood speed inovation in all thier products. Examples would be “Print direct to Fedex” Adobe forgeting who thier customers are, a feature that got the whole of the printing industry up in arms to the point where they withdrew the servers. Recently I found the lighting effects pluton in Photoshop crashes top end Mac Pros and after searching the forums I found a download for a replacment that is 4x faster. Currently CS4 cannot access more than 3.8 gb of ram and seldom uses all the processors to capacity and does not use any of the virtual processor on iCore 7 processors. I hope for Adobe’s sake they get CS5 the rocket power it needs and put the mac version ahead of the PC or there will be a price to pay for being average.
“good enough” is the key phrase. Translation? Virgin is manipulated by Apple’s restriction of trade policy to use a sub-standard means of rendering their webpages. We the users, should have the choice to determine if we want to see a website in its entirety using Flash, or if we wish to conserve iPhone battery power by not activating Flash.
I sent the email to Hulu.
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Air Canada has a free iPhone app for checking flights and checking in etc. Obviously not using Flash!
Mac Control,
I, the user, am thrilled that content owners are finally beginning to move away from the most atrocious bloated battery drain there is. I don’t want anything to do with Flash. And there are many users like me. So, yes, We the users are thrilled that a fairly high-visibility company is not choosing the path of least resistance in order to deliver their content, but is providing content that works for ALL, and not just SOME users, using technologies that don’t require a separate Niagara Falls power plant to sustain.
Virgin America’s site looks great without Flash. Content is still animated and interactive, and it is difficult to tell that there isn’t any Flash there (except for that route map; hopefully, that will go away soon as well).
Contrast this with Condé Nast’s (Wired, GQ) clueless attempt to flex their publishing muscle in “support” of reader “choice.”
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100228/conde-nasts-ipad-plan-gets-caught-in-the-apple-adobe-crossfire/
Yes, Apple’s horrible. Diabolically forcing open standards on us. Why don’t they give us the choice to enjoy the closed goodness of Flash? Who cares that it’s coded by chimpanzees? That’s really not important.
What’s important is that Flash locks people into a proprietary commercial platform, which is good, because too much freedom makes me feel insecure, and also sort of like a Communist. I for one want Adobe to dictate the internet.
Damnit, Steve Jobs. Let we the users decide!
Branson is the man.
Predrag, you hit the nail right on the head! An airline company’s website can’t display the route map without Flash. That’s not trivial. It’s an essential part of the information that is unavailable on my iPhone. Map? Who needs it, right? It’s only an itinerary, after all. Kind of like a recipe – but, oh well, the ingredients didn’t show up on the webpage. But let’s stick with a format which cannot display the site in it’s entirety. Excellent plan.
@ Macromancer –
Don’t know what your issues with YouTube in HTML5, but it works great on my 24-inch iMac running 10.5.8…
Maybe you need to upgrade to the latest version of Sarafi??
Hey guys, I wrote to Hulu. Here’s their reply:
Hi Fouzan,
Thanks for writing.
We’re keeping a close watch on video support in HTML5. While as developers we are
always excited about cool new technology, we always analyze it from the
perspective of the needs of our customers: our end users, advertisers, and content
partners. To serve these customers well, we’d love to see further support in HTML5
for features including the following:
– Quality of service monitoring (e.g. detecting playback glitches)
– Advertisement playback and reporting
– Secure content delivery
We look forward to further development of the new standard and will continue to
monitor it closely.
Thanks,
Charles Reeves
Hulu
03/02/2010 13:50 – Fouzan wrote:
Dear HULU team,
I really like your site, and it’s great being able to watch video on demand.
With flashplayer becoming clunky and consuming a very high percentage of CPU for
the end user, i would like to request that you consider HTML 5 video on your web
page. This would open up your website to mobile users like me who would love to be
able to watch your videos on the go.
Many of us who like and use yor website would love it even more to be able to
access shows on the go. Please consider the switch to HTML 5 and other live codes
because flash is a giant that consumes CPU cycles causing laggy video and we would
love to see it go.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Fouzan
“Silicon Valley titans”? Apple is worth $180B, Adobe $18B – I’m sure the price of entry into the Titan Club is $100B… So maybe this is David and Goliath, except that stone David’s holding is melting in his hand, and it’s Adobe that looks like the dumb giant.
@Choice – the choice is yours – you can have the iPhone, or you can have Flash). You cannot have the cake and eat it too. That’s pretty much what Flash is – non-nutritional calories that ends up around your waist and arteries and slows you down. Time to put people on a strict nutritional program without Flash. You’ll feel so much better after you lose the addiction.
@Mac Control
‘”good enough” is the key phrase.’
No, you missed the next key phrase: “…for animating online content on its brand-new website”.
These two phrases are connected in the same sentence. Really, I can’t see how you overlooked that, unless you were trying to force a conclusion that fits your bias.
The key thing that Virgin want to do is to provide check-in facilities for their iPhone customers. Or for any customers, for that matter. I don’t see how Flash would be a real benefit there. Most sites use JavaScript for that kind of thing.
Have you seen some of the new trailer pages on the Apple site. The ones that have the kind of tabbed overlay in shades of grey? These are very nice effects, and they are all done in HTML5 I think. Can’t wait til my HTML coding skills get up to that level. Lots of potential there.
Flash just looks like a bunch of flashy tables in comparison. I can’t stand the text areas with scrolling blocks of text in them that you can’t select.
Flash was fine for animated, interactive CD-ROMs back in the day; heck, I used it about 12-13 years ago and made a few CD-ROMs. It just isn’t suited to the web, and anyone who is still sweet on it is really flogging a dead horse.
If I see a predominantly Flash site, or one with a Flash intro or template, I immediately move on. Shows me the web site designer does not know how to choose his medium or technology. I feel just as annoyed as if I was handed an AOL CD at the check-out counter. It’s going in the trash. Please.
Future-of-Flash, meet domino. And another domino. And another domino. …
@Mac Control
“Predrag, you hit the nail right on the head! An airline company’s website can’t display the route map without Flash. That’s not trivial. It’s an essential part of the information that is unavailable on my iPhone. Map? Who needs it, right? It’s only an itinerary, after all. Kind of like a recipe – but, oh well, the ingredients didn’t show up on the webpage. But let’s stick with a format which cannot display the site in it’s entirety. Excellent plan.”
Google Maps uses Flash? That’s news to me!