Question

and is flash being replaced by another standard like html 5 completely?

Answer 1

No, Flash Player and other mentionable browser plugins (Silverlight, Unity, Java FX, O3D) will not be replaced by web standards in the foreseeable future.

Web standards move slowly and have to be implemented by every major browser vendor and then updated by all users to be actually usefull. To understand what this means, one should consider that IE 6 still has about 9% market share today.

In contrast to web standards, a 3d party browser plugin is maintained by only one company. If that company decides to add or alter features of their plugin, all they have to do is to implement the changes and have users install according updates.

Thus web standards are feature designs that need to satisfy a committee consisting of several major companies, who have different interests and ideas, and that has multiple implementations that must be written, tested and fixed.
In contrast, 3rd party plugins stem from a feature design made by one company, with only one implementation to be maintained by that very same company.

For this reason, 3rd party plugins will always offer functionality web standards will implement much later, if at all.

As a comparison: Flash supports vector graphics since its release in 1997, streaming audio since 1999 and video since 2002. HTML5 is barely implemented on some browsers and the standard is due for 2022. Now everyone is so excited about HTML5, since in a near future some (possibly incompatible) implementations will be able to do the things Flash did in the last millenium. yeah!!!!

The biggest problem here is ignorance and arrogance. The ignorance causes further arrogance and the arrogance causes further ignorance.

The truth is, web technology is always far ahead of what is actually implemented. Since a few years, everybody is hot about AJAX. None the less it relies on techniques that have been available and used since more than a decade. Youtube was launched 3 years after Flash had streaming video capabilities. And only since a few years has internet video become the new trend. While now everybody sees the new trend, they’re excited that it’ll one day no longer rely on 3rd party plugins. How great.

The web as a platform is very often looked down at by classical developers. That is, because they assess only what they see and infer from that, that the available technologies are not capable of more. In turn, many web developers look down on Flash developers, since they make the very same mistake. All they see is banners, video player and poorly created multimedia sites loading for ages and annoying visitors with awful sounds. Rest assured: once HTML5 is available, such sites will be created in HTML5 as well.

The main point is, Flash is a platform capable of creating great apps, such as Phoenix, Sliderocket or Tanki Online, just to name a few outstanding ones. Flash supports P2P communication, video/voice transmission, TCP and many other things that are really far from being exploited in any major apps. Flash for example currently provides all necessary means to move chatting (IM, audio, video) into the browser, which may hit the web like web videos hit it years ago. Who knows.

HTML5’s role is not to replace Flash but to provide better semantics and utilities for common information presentation in the web. The task of 3rd party plugins is the presentation of uncommon information and to provide features that are potentially the basis of further innovation.

These technologies, including HTML, all have their place. And depending on what you’re planning to do, there’s always the right tool.