The advent of HTML5 has initiated a revolution which started with web development and is now already an important player in the mobile application development arena. The greater integration of HTML5 with all major web browsers poses a fatal threat to Flash. Till now flash has been the major choice when it came to displaying video and audio content in a web browser. Viewing HTML5 as “Flash Killer” has been a topic for debate till only sometime back. But with Adobe giving up on Flash for mobile devices, the picture is pretty much clear now, atleast in the area of mobile devices. Adobe announced in November 2011 that Flash Player 11.1 would be the last version of Flash for mobile devices. Adobe has also stopped the development of Flash for connected TVs. Adobe itself has recognized the amazing potential that HTML5 has. This has come as a blessing in disguise for Apple which had already refused to integrate Flash with its iPads and iPhones.

Earlier complicated animations, games, screen-casts, video and audio were mostly possible only with Flash but support for these features has been incorporated in HTML5. Adobe is already working on increased support for hardware based acceleration in Flash which is already a key feature of HTML5 for quite some time. Now with the help of HTML5 and CSS3 amazing texts effects and fonts can be used that was mostly done by Flash in the days gone by.

Inspite of the numerous advantages that HTML5 holds over Flash, it would be unwise to declare Flash as dead. Flash is still important as a software and game development tool. We should not forget that HTML5 is still in its drafting stage and it needs to undergo many changes before it can replace Flash. However, there are companies that have been using Flash for years to develop their products and HTML5 alone cannot make them to drop Flash. In terms of Open Web technologies, HTML5 may be able to completely route out Flash from areas where it has been acting as a stub.