Adobe Flash

I thought I’d write another short post on my view of Adobe Flash, and why I think there is such a negative reaction to it. We went through a bit of a war over Adobe Flash when the iPhone was originally announced, and I think we’re going through one again, only this time the technology field has changed sufficiently to make an entirely new battle. When the iPhone was originally announced, and Flash support was discovered to be lacking, there was a great deal of outrage. At the time, it was a de facto standard. Since then, web developers have begun to code their websites more and more for non-Flash devices. Major sites like YouTube have developed HTML5 player alternatives for their videos. There is a lot more weight against Adobe to prove why Flash is necessary this time around.

What is Flash used for? In my experience, Flash is generally used for the following:

• Ads
• Games
• Music Players
• Movie Players
• Photo Galleries

Lets look at each one of these categories in a bit more detail.

Ads: Those annoying, flashy (excuse the pun) banners you see on some of the riff-raff sites of the internet. The big, ugly, strong-coloured patches in the websites you visit… generally are Flash. Very few people appreciate Flash ads. As a matter of fact, they were one of the leading instigators in the ad-blocking plugin market.

Games: This I believe is the only category that truly justifies the ‘interactive’ benefit that Flash provides. There is nothing else that remotely comes close to the power of Flash interactivity for web interface games. However, I have a problem with the category. It is generally either children or reclusive adults that tend to play Flash games. The majority of the adult population use the web for information consumption. The majority of children/teenagers will use a dedicated gaming device. I also think that as the iTunes App Store market matures in the gaming category, the majority of users will find much more value in natively coded games.

Music Streaming Another category that Flash is very prevalent in usage. Sites like MySpace, Last.fm, and others tend to use a Flash player by default. The reason for this is that Flash tends to be a very quick, easy to implement solution for music playback and playlist generation. There is nothing else available right now that offers the webmaster anything nearly as easy to implement. Until HTML5 becomes a bit more prevalent, Flash will be used de facto for music playback in the browser. Fortunately for us iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users, some of these sites have published API’s, and some have their own dedicated app in the iTunes App Store (e.g., Last.fm). Also, the majority of iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad users will have iTunes syncing their music to their device.

Movie Players I would argue that this category would come close to Music Streaming in prevalence of Flash implementation. Unfortunately for Adobe, HTML5 offers a native implementation for movie streaming, via the ‘video’ tag. As HTML5 browsers become more prevalent, and sites like YouTube switch to either a single HTML5 portal, or a dual HTML5/Flash service, Adobe will have a harder time justifying the need for Flash in the Movie Player category.

Photo Galleries As an amateur photographer, I’ve found that the many self-hosted photo gallery solutions for servers are Flash based. However, this is again generally due to laziness on the part of programmers, or because there are a lot of easy, of-the-shelf solutions for the photographers with little computer knowledge. There are many native web coded galleries that work just as well, and are not hard to implement. Unfortunately, the majority of photographers do not have much of a budget for displaying their photos on the web, and generally hire a low-cost (usually inexperienced) web developer to build a photo site for them. There’s no technical justification for using Flash to display a gallery of photos.

Over the next few years, as HTML5 capable browsers become more ubiquitous, and providers start providing dual-service HTML5/Flash streaming, the need for Flash Movie Players will become miniscule. Thanks to the iTunes App Store, the desire for Flash games is swiftly disappearing. As applications like Lightroom and Aperture continue integrating web-publishing, photographers using professional tools for their photos will have less and less need to hire a third-party, inexperience web developer for Photo Galleries. In the end, the only justification for a webmaster to use Adobe Flash is for publishing Ads, and using it as an easy-to-implement Music Streaming player.

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