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Comment by jbri | Hacker News Reader

What would be the advantage of doing this in Flash instead of HTML5?

Development time. Flash has a broader range of libraries and tools to accomplish this much faster than in html5. Also, the game doesn't run on my iPhone because it can't support sending key-presses, it's stuck on the intro screen. The clouds that are being animated are moving a 10th of the speed compared to the desktop version.

My question is, by the time that smart phones become fast enough to run stable versions of these html5 games, won't they also be able to handle flash games with relative ease as well?

Flash is more widely supported

Do you have a source for that? Interesting in seeing.

I just looked up analytics of a very popular website (13M monthly)

Flash is supported by 93% of the visitors.

HTML5 = 50%.

A more interesting question is HTML5 penetration in your target market - rather than general usage, it would be interesting to look at the analytics from an established Flash Gaming site.

Stats from igre123.net (flash gaming site) we run: about 1.5m uniques/month: chrome: 38%, firefox (mostly v8&v9) 37%, IE 20% (v8 62%, v9 23%, v7 9% & v6 4%). So >80% HTML5. I can't find data for flash it the new analytics. But last time I checked (when I was stil able to) it was high, almost 100%.

Which website? That can make a huge difference. Audience, demographics, country etc can all lead to a huge bias on the results.

[Citation Needed]

Chrome supports HTML5, and there are a lot of Chrome installs out there.

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