Pandora uses jPlayer to play audio which has an invisible Flash component to play mp3s on browsers that don't support it.
If Firefox requires 'click-to-play' on an on-screen piece of Flash to enable it, all sites using jPlayer to play mp3 simply will not work.
And of course this doesn't just affect jPlayer, many other players use this technique.
Much better -- as mistercow reasons -- to have a pop-up asking you if you wish to run Flash on a particular site and I would love to see an 'always allow' option here.
As one of the developers of jPlayer - it's great to see this discussion. We're a building up the motivation to create a new release and we'd be interested in hearing any ideas the HN community has.
If you are looking for a technical article check Cubiq'a excellent series of articles on the subject. http://cubiq.org/hexagame-the-making-of-an-html5-game As a bonus you can play with the source code as it's all open source.
The point is both Adobe and the W3C are guessing. Think how much faster we could advance if it was put in the hands of the community. A community that constantly implements, gets feedback, re-implements, collaborates. You only have to look at three.js (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/) and similar to get an idea of what can be built on a low-level API.
The debate isn't about whether Flash is more capable than HTML5 - more whether HTML5 is a better 'model' than Flash and when I say better I mean that 1. It is not owned by any one company and 2. You can view the source.
Viewing the source has been fundamental to the evolution of the web and it will be fundamental going forward - with Flash you can't do it. Not to mention that Flash's sand-boxed implementation doesn't play nicely with other HTML elements. (Try manipulating Flash video with Canvas).
But what the author is really talking about is changing the process of establishing standards - bottom up rather than top down. Give us, the developers the basic building blocks and we will build the rest. It should become obvious then what to implement as a standard, if anything.
I recently read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters and although I certainly don't agree with all he says, one paragraph stood out:
"Let yourself be second-guessed. When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn't intend, and this is especially true of a highly articulated tool like a programming language. Many a hacker will want to tweak your semantic model in a way that you never imagined. I say let them. Give the programmer access to as much internal stuff as you can."
I think whoever implements this type of model will eventually have the upper-hand, open-sourcing your code seems a small price to pay for robustness, auto-scaling and performance.
I don't think Twitter's success is down to its code being proprietary. I think you're selling them short.
If Firefox requires 'click-to-play' on an on-screen piece of Flash to enable it, all sites using jPlayer to play mp3 simply will not work.
And of course this doesn't just affect jPlayer, many other players use this technique.
Much better -- as mistercow reasons -- to have a pop-up asking you if you wish to run Flash on a particular site and I would love to see an 'always allow' option here.