because its the distribution that is innovative, its nice being able to draw tex...

kenjackson · on March 16, 2011

the fact that you can build increasingly complex application that will work on a common runtime installed on every pc and most people tablets and phones without (barely)any packaging or installation procedures is a modern day miracle

This requires me to install a whole browser! For some reason the HN crowd sees installing FF4 as free. Installing a plug-in as nearly the equivalent to jail time, a horrendous chore.

With all due respect to all the excitement in mobile (where Flash is nonexistent), HTML5 fundamentally won't change the desktop at all. And certainly looking at an application that I've seen high school students do in Flash is simply not exciting. I salute HTML for finally getting there, but its just not fundamentally very interesting.

bzbarsky · on March 17, 2011

> Installing a plug-in as nearly the equivalent to jail > time, a horrendous chore.

That's because that's what it generally has been, in the case of Flash. You may want to read http://blog.zpao.com/post/538816688/how-to-install-flash-on-... if you haven't had that particular "pleasure"...

daleharvey · on March 16, 2011

Installing a plugin is generally a one click procedure and I made no reference to firefox or plugins.

I wasnt being specific to this one page (which works in chrome as well), but at the same time it can be viewed in browsers going back to mosaic with varying degrees of aesthetic.

html has already changed the desktop and it is only going to go further, there are operating systems coming out that have nothing but a browser, most phones these days come with a browser, we are still in the early stages of building the most ubiqitous and usable computing platform that has ever existed, you might not get excited about it, but I do.