It’s Apple versus Adobe in a winner-take-all battle for multimedia supremacy on your smartphone, tablet, and personal computer. That’s been the narrative since Steve Jobs famously dissed Adobe’s Flash platform as “a closed system” back in 2010 and hitched Apple’s star to the HTML5 multimedia standard for Web browsers.

Several years after that big break, who’s winning? One More Level details the horse race through the prism of mobile and social gaming in the infographic below—and it turns out that Flash maintains a pretty big edge over HTML5 by most metrics, but that HTML5 momentum appears to be growing.

It’s also worth noting that Adobe itself has hit the brakeson developing its Flash Player for mobile browsers to focus on HTML5-based development, so this trend is likely to accelerate. When Google released Chrome for Android beta this week, for example, Adobe noted that it would not support Flash.

But for the time being, Flash reigns supreme in gaming by most measures.

There are more than 100,000 Flash-based games out there to play on mobile devices or social sites like Facebook compared with just a couple hundred HTML5 titles (though it’s worth noting that the most popular games on Facebook are more likely to use HTML5 than the majority of Web-based games, which continue to use Flash).

Flash also offers security advantages over HTML5, according to One More Level, plus the .swf file format used to distribute Flash games is a lot simpler than the multiple files currently needed for HTML5 games.

One area where there seems to be a push is in CPU usage. Fittingly, HTML5 beats out Flash in terms of CPU usage on most browser tests run on Apple’s Macs, whereas browser tests on Microsoft Windows tend to favor Flash (and some browsers, like Safari, won’t play HTML5 videos on a Windows system).

Created by: One More Level

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400020,00.asp