With a few but growing number of exceptions (most notably YouTube which currently relies on Adobe Flash for video playback) the vast majority of the most popular web sites are native web applications. Despite this, every major site makes use of RIA frameworks such as JavaScript/JavaFX and Adobe Flash.

With Adobe Flash having a 98% or more market penetration in mature markets, it is actually more widely available than any one of the web browsers in existence. Adobe Flash runs on more platforms and more devices and can run outside of the web browser environment, thus making it the currently most prevalent web proprietary standard and a widely pre-installed deployment environment for Rich Internet Applications.

Key Characteristics of RIA's

• Accessibility Adobe Flash is an RIA framework that is universally searchable.
• Advanced communications with supporting servers can improve the user experience, for example by using optimised network protocols, asynchronous I/O and pre-fetching data (eg Google Maps). Accordingly, reliable broadband connections are often required.
• Complexity of advanced solutions can make them more difficult to design, develop, deploy and debug than traditional web applications (but typically less so than application software).
• Consistency of user interface and experience can be controlled across operating systems. Performance monitoring and fault diagnosis can be particularly difficult.
• Installation and Maintenance of plug-ins, sandboxes or virtual machines is required (but applications are smaller than their predecessors and updates are typically automated). Installation is typically faster than that of application software but slower than that of native web applications and automation may not be possible.
• Offline use may be supported by retaining state locally on the client machine, but developments in web standards (prototyped in Google Gears) have also enabled this for native web applications.
• Security can improve over that of application software (for example through use of sandboxes and automatic updates) but the extensions themselves are subject to vulnerabilities and access possible is often much greater than that of native web applications[10].
• Performance can improve depending on the application and network characteristics. In particular, applications which can avoid the latency of round-trips to the server by processing locally on the client are often a lot faster. Offloading work to the clients can also improve server performance. Conversely the resource requirements can be prohibitive for small, embedded and mobile devices.
• Richness by way of features not supported natively by the web browser such as video capture (eg Adobe Flash).
• Standards Flash revolutionized delivery of video content on the web, dethroning such stalwarts as Media Player and Quicktime.