Some of the big sites I'm involved with are on track to hit 10% mobile use before the end of the year. And most of that is iOS.
The assumption that "most people" are windows desktop users is becoming less and less valid.
Adobe would need to invest a _lot_ to make a good HTML5 IDE, and what would they get then? At best they'd be in the same situation as they were before just with HTML5 instead of Flash, and on top of that they would have lost control of the platform.
So the bean counters find this kind of proposition difficult to swallow. And if you say: but what if someone else did? Then they'll reply: well, then make sure Flash kills anything HTML5 related, and that's how they end up putting a lot of money to preserve the status quo, instead of using their baskets full of gold to make them run faster.
Compared to C, Java, OCaml, and so forth, perhaps.
Compared to Ruby, Python, and PHP - not so much. (take a look at the v8 entry. and this is from '09 - v8 has seen some performance improvements since then)
http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependabil...
It would be interesting, though, if someone could point me (and everyone else) to a reasonable, credible comparison of HTML5+JS vs. Flash vs. Silverlight.
It is much faster than Flash (my tests where the RSA encryption algorithm), has a way more comprehensive library (specially for data manipulation) and "looks" way more secure than Flash (please take this last one with a grain of salt).
Its acceptance is still lagging (I estimate something like 50%-60%), but growing fast. MS promised the new Windows 7 phone with Silverlight on it for September. It might increase acceptance.
From what I see HTML 5 adds a lot of interesting new gadgets and features (like websockets and video streaming). It is a great innovation, but is not for complex Rich Internet Applications.
I'd expect, for the next 5 years, Silverlight to become the platform of choice for RIA (mostly CRUD applications), HTML5 for video streaming and some simpler games and Flash critically sandwiched between both.
I made a blog post a few weeks ago on the matter: http://www.andresosinski.com.ar/blog_view_entry/?id=6
1) in most of your post you argue against the performance of VS2010 and how slow it is to edit XAML, not the performance of your Silverlight code/application. I take that it was as good as mine. And I think that this is what is being discussed here.
2) I agree that VS2010 is indeed much slower than previous versions, although I didn't experience something as terrible as you. But I am running it in a 3GHz quad-core with 4Gb of RAM, so...
3) Silverlight is a WEB client solution and that's the scope of this discussion and the post I answered. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think frameworks like Django and Rails are server-side technologies and, as such, don't compare to Flash and HTML5, and are out of scope for this discussion, right?
Silverlight will get a bit bigger but it's never going to matter in the long term, any more than Java applets ever will.
I think this is a remnant from a time long gone, where applets were much worse than they are now. They have worse user experience than flash, but the difference isn't really that big anymore (e.g. http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/).
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/does_html5_really_beat_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actionscript
Adobe's had a JIT Actionscript compiler for years and it's really quite fast.
Take a look at Silverlight. Its performance will surprise you, I am sure.
The fact is that HTML5 is not a reasonable general replacement for Flash. If you want your thing to work for most people, you are going to have to write in Flash anyway. Realistically, only a relative handful of people could run a HTML5/JavaScript program at Flash-equivalent speeds. And that assumes that you just want something in Flash that HTML5 could do; there's still RTMP and significant swaths of other stuff that Flash does and HTML5 doesn't.