Scribd, the popular online document sharing site, has decided that it doesn’t see Flash in it’s future. According to co-founder Jared Friedman, “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”
Chalk this up as another loss for Adobe, who is currently facing major criticisms from Apple and others regarding it’s Flash product. The hottest new mobile gadget, the iPad, does not support Flash at all. There are no plans for it to support Flash. Steve Jobs has taken time out to write lengthy rants about Flash. Other companies and brands are moving to support HTML5 alongside Flash, many just so that their stuff works on the iPad.
Scribd is taking a major step here in dropping years of Flash development to embrace a technology that’s not even the standard yet. I think they will reap great benefits in the long run, though. Porting away from Flash to HTML5 means that their books will be readable on the iPad as well as a host of other mobile devices. You will no longer need to download or purchase ebooks from some proprietary online store as they will be available via Scribd in a simple format. You will be able to share them across your social networks and view them from just about any browser just like any other standard webpage.
The change just seems to make sense. A document isn’t so complicated that it should require so much overhead. When you think about it, it makes no sense that we often have to view documents inside a little flash box. Friedman plans to take our documents out of these little boxes and hand us the content. He has been working on this in secret for the past six months and believes that 97 percent of browsers will be able to view the new Scribd books. We have mostly heard about video as it relates to HTML5, but this part of the standard is new. Documents rely on features of HTML5 that are older and more widely supported.
Scridb will convert about 200,000 of it’s most popular documents tomorrow. The rest are soon to follow.
via Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5