A case study using PDF flip books: the real state of flash versus HTML5
7 October 2013
When Apple and Steve Jobs 3 years ago decided to turn their back on Adobe Flash, the web industry started a major shift towards HTML5 as opposed to using Flash when creating animations and transitions for the web. At that time, many of the modern web browsers were still in a state unable to do everything necessary to really rid Flash out of the way for HTML5. Much has happened since then.
» Compare HTML5 and Flash performance in some real examples
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Development Environment
The latest versions of Google Chrome are blazingly fast in animations and transitions and huge steps has been taken forward in improving the development environment for developers using HTML5 in all major browsers. With Google in the lead, Google has added a whole set of new debugging tools to the latest stable version of Google Chrome. We really recommend you have a look at the Google Developer talks on structural and sampling from Google if you have not done so yet and you are into serious development with HTML5. This talk with Paul Irish is a great starting point if you want to get serious about HTML5 development.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAqjyCH_LOE]
A real world case using PDF flip books : PDF documents with page turn effects in HTML5
So how has this evolution affected our environment for our viewers in creating animated page transitions for published PDF documents? Well much has happened since the first versions of mobile web safari was published and since people started moving into using HTML5. The first versions of mobile web safari had problems displaying larger images and files causing the viewer to really struggle when trying to deliver a sharper zoomed document to these more memory limited devices.
Since then, mobile safari has matured a great deal and we believe all of the modern versions of all major browsers have reached a point where they are fully capable of displaying our documents with page turn animations and high quality zoom factors. There may still may be individual cases where you think Flash has a upper hand in how a specific document gets displayed due to differences in how these technologies handle vector graphics but we really think that in the majority of cases, our HTML5 viewer actually surpasses the flash viewer in performance!
We really didn’t know how far we would get when we initially started developing our HTML5 viewer but we are amazed at the speed the latest browser versions are showing. We believe that much of the performance gains that will be seen going forward will be due to the incredible development support that these browsers are now giving in terms of profiling. Where Adobe Flash sits on top of the browser, these tools gives us direct access into the core of how the browser is rendering each page turn and every transition operation.
What do you think?
We would love to hear which of our viewers you think performs best! Have a go with our examples on our demo page or download our flip book software (available for both Mac and PC) and give it a go with your own documents! You can switch between HTML5 and Flash directly on our demo page.
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