Flash vs. HTML5 vs. Anything else
I love flash.
Without flash, I would have never wanted to be a designer. Praystation and other sites where designers uploaded "experiments" drove me to learn and to hack and to code and to draw and to create.
But today: flash sucks.
(It kinda always has really.)
It uses too much cpu on a mac (this is known), AS3 is alienating designers (bread and butter user-base), and there are just some strange bugs (but that doesn't really matter as much).
I still love it. I still use it. And oh boy do I know about some weird bugs with large bitmaps and caching and writing your own bitmap caching and using listeners to make an event loop to register queues to process things so the UI never lags (cause it's going to lag) and on and on.
All just so I can draw things on the screen and maybe even move them every now and then.
That is what I want do. The internet allows anyone to create something beautiful and immediately share it with anyone else.
So will HTML5 kill Flash?
No.
Why would it? Plugins will exist as long as the content we want requires them.
If content creators make content that doesn't require plugins, fine, but what we want is the content.
Flash doesn't matter. Neither does HTML5. Neither does anything else. If people really want content that requires flash to consume, they will find a way to use flash.
People just want to create and share things. They will continue doing that.