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Grandmaster Flash vs. Jackson HTML5

I absolutely hate Flash. I don't know wether I hate more that it's a proprietary, CPU-hungry and unstable piece of shit, or the fact that 9 times out of 10 it's used for mind numbingly horrid multimedia-vommit whose sole purpose is to make a website load exponentially slower and generally just piss off the user.

Having said that, you may find it surprising that we use Flash on ACDN website - for the pre-listening function, to be precise. The LongTail Video's JW Player actually works quite well for a Flash-application. Currently there's really no cross-browser compatible way of adding audio/video to a website other than Flash. Quite recently there has been a lot of hype in the news how HTML5 will replace Flash - mainly due to the addition of the new <audio> and <video> tags. We should be so lucky!

I'd like nothing more than to dump Flash and start implementing standard HTML5, but sadly that's not possible because browser vendors can't agree on which audio formats they should support. Firefox supports Vorbis and WAV but not MP3 due to some patent and open source ideology issues. Safari supports MP3 and WAV, while Chrome supports Vorbis and MP3. The only format that Opera supports is WAV.

Long story short, the problem is that there is no single audio format that would be compatible with all browsers. In my opinion, if there would be one format that all browser vendors should support it's the ubiquitous MP3. Given Firefox's substantial market share, it's mostly up to Mozilla Foundation wether or not the <audio> tag will ever be useful. I understand where they are coming from, but sometimes it's better to forget ideology for a moment and think about practicality and user's needs. Same goes for the Theora vs. H.264 debate on the video side.

Then of course there is Internet Explorer, being the pathetic joke that it is, which doesn't support <audio> tag whatsoever. If those asshats at Microsoft had a single working brain cell, they would have dumped Trident and switched to Gecko or WebKit ages ago. But hey, why support anything useful like HTML5, CSS3, SVG or comply to W3C standards when you can screw around with proprietary crap like ActiveX or Silverlight. The upcoming IE9 is promised to change all that, but given their track record I won't start holding my breath just quite yet.

It's beyond my comprehension why any sane person would willingly be using Internet Explorer. The myriad of security holes and the user interface that keeps getting worse after each revision would be adequate reasons to abhor it. Fortunately majority of our visitors know better - only a small minority (7%) still insist on torturing themselves with IE. Cheers guys, thanks to people like you the web is always dragging five years behind!