Adobe Releases Flash To HTML 5 Converter

An anonymous reader writes "Adobe has released its Flash to HTML 5 conversion tool, codenamed 'Wallaby.' Wallaby is an application to convert Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5 and its primary design goals were to get the best quality and performance on browsers within iOS devices like iPhone and iPad."

Re:Is a subject really necessary?

[dingen]

Why wouldn't browsers be capable of the same level of performance in rendering vector graphics as Flash? Especially since hardware acceleration is already implemented by most browsers on most platforms and Javascript engines are already highly optimized, creating smoother canvas / SVG animations could well be the next big thing browser developers will aim for.

Re:Finally, but

[TheRaven64]

You're confusing two different issues. Adobe has an incentive to add new features to the Flash authoring tools, much less incentive to improve the plugin: it doesn't directly generate revenue and it's got no competition.

If HTML5 support matures a bit more, Flash Professional will probably evolve into an HTML 5 rich content authoring platform. This is great from Adobe's perspective - they get to keep the profitable bit (the authoring tool) and let other companies absorb develop their their loss leader.

Flash Player is currently a strange beast. It has some amazing technology (the JIT compiler is pretty impressive), and some really hideous legacy stuff (like doing colour space transforms and compositing entirely on the CPU, because that made sense 15 years ago) that cripples performance. There's no incentive for Adobe to rewrite the legacy parts that are 'good enough', but if Mozilla's canvas implementation is significantly slower than the one in IE or WebKit then they lose marketing points so they have a strong incentive to improve it.