Tech-notes

Since the time since we launched, SlideShare has been using Flash to display your slides. When we first built SlideShare, it was impossible to build something like SlideShare without Flash. But the web has finally caught up!

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are ditching Flash to move to HTML5. All slides uploaded from today on will be converted to HTML5. As before, they will faithfully reproduce what is in the original Powerpoint, Keynote, PDF, document or any of the 28 formats we support. But there are some big advantages to having your presentations in HTML5.

What does this mean for your slides?

• Your slides will display flawlessly on an iPhone, iPad, Android and any other mobile platform. You can send a link to friends and colleagues, and they can view it on the go regardless of what device they are using.
• Your slides will now load 30% faster. On the web, faster is better.
• Your slides will be a part of the web. No plugins or downloads are required to view them.

A mobile web app that works everywhere (not an app in an App Store)

We did not just rebuild how presentations display. We are also launching a new mobile site – so you can view interesting new presentations or just waste a few minutes browsing presentations your friend sent you.

We considered an app approach (build a SlideShare app in Apple & Android stores) at the beginning of the project, but moved to creating a full mobile website, since we wanted to reach the most number of users with our mobile offering. If you send someone a link to a presentation and they have to download an app to view it, that’s not a pleasant user experience. We want presentations on mobile devices to be accessible to as many users as possible.

Who will benefit from this development

Every SlideShare user will benefit from having slides in HTML5. Whether you are a teacher who wants your students to view their slides (some of who are using iPads), a conference speaker who wants the audience to follow along with the slides, a salesperson who wants to show your sales slides on a mobile device, or any SlideShare user who wants to send a link to a friend without worrying about whether they can view the content or not – this change will help you.

This project has been the biggest engineering effort in SlideShare’s history. Our SlideShare engineering team has been working on this around-the-clock for the last six months. We have learned over the past five years that people are particular about how their presentations look. Getting the fonts and the text placement to display exactly right across all supported browsers was a real engineering challenge. So we’re happy to finally be able to see this on SlideShare.net.

We hope you like this move. Tell us in the comments below what you think.