I thought I’d write a quick post in response to the posts by John Nack, Product Manager at Adobe, and The Flash Blog regarding the lack of Flash on the iPad (and iPhone). You can find their respective posts here and here.
First, in response to John Nack, who makes the point that Flash has brought standardization to the web. Yes, while it did bring a standard to the web for a while, once Adobe purchased Macromedia, Flash itself started fragmenting into many different versions which supported different levels of features. This resulted in many users having to upgrade their Flash plugins depending on the site visited. How is this any better a ‘standard’ than HTML5? Might as well force the user to upgrade their browser to a standards-compliant version.
So, Flash provides ubiquitous browser video playback? Who cares? YouTube and Vimeo are switching to HTML5, Hulu is committed to providing iPad compliant service, and everyone else doesn’t care what they use to play video in their browser. As Internet Explorer 8 begins mass penetration (via Windows 7) and Internet Explorer 6 support is dropped (as Google announced yesterday), Flash will become less & less important. Lets be honest here. The only reason Flash is really needed is IE6′s existence. Everything else can and should be implemented via HTML5 and standards-compliant services such as OpenType.
John Nack concludes with a point that the Flash team will likely be using the GPU to bring fast performance to the desktop plugin. Who cares? The iPad and iPhone are mobile devices. Utilizing a separate GPU to do the processing is irrelevant on a mobile device that uses System-on-a-Chip design.
He also makes the point that the download size for QuickTime is twice that of Flash. Irrelevant. Most of the Flash-haters he is targeting with this post (and most Adobe CS users) are running a Mac, with native support. And most people with iTunes installed (read: everyone with an iPod/iPhone) have QuickTime installed as part of Apple Software Update. So no, ubiquity is not dependent on the download size of your plugin.
Second, in response to The Flash Blog. Have of the sites you illustrated have an iPhone compliant version (as pointed out by Mark Hughes here), and likely more will by the time iPad launches. Other sites have worthwhile iPhone app alternatives. Why should I use your plugin if the iPad supports native HTML5, and the majority of video media is capable of being delivered to me that way (YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu?) I don’t want to play Flash web games, and with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, most games that people will be playing will be native iPhone apps anyway. So there is no use for Flash for media playback or gaming on iPhone OS. What does Flash offer me then?
Your Flash plugin performance sucks. Small wonder Apple didn’t want didn’t want a battery pig like that on the iPhone and iPad.
Flash is dead. I hate the platform with a passion, and while I’d love to watch it die a long and slow death, the faster it goes the better. With Google’s latest announcement that they will stop supporting IE6, HTML5 ubiquity will hopefully begin. Flash is useless if my content is delivered to me through other streams, whether the iTunes store, HTML5, or a dedicated app. If I want an ‘interactive’ game, I’ll stick with a native iPhone or iPad application. There is nothing that Flash offers me, and no real way for it to ‘innovate’ against the march of technological progress. Welcome to the New World folks.
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Tags: Adobe, death, Flash, HTML5, iPad, iPhone OS, John Nack, standards, The Flash Blog
Good