Der zweite Blick Progressiv, links, analytisch

About Flash and why there is no love

During Steve Jobs’ iPad pre­sen­ta­tion it became appa­rent that Flash isn’t sup­por­ted in Mobile Safari on this device eit­her — just like on the iPhone. The whole web star­ted to argue: Is Flash the »New Comic Sans« or the »New Java App­let« or did it just fall from grace but is still a sus­tainable technology?

First of all, Apple don’t just hate Adobe or Flash. Apple and Adobe were fri­ends for a long time — espe­cially on Pho­to­shop — and still are. And some whim­pe­ring Flash fana­tics won’t stop that. Apple even gave per­mis­sion for Flash CS5 com­pi­led Flash app­li­ca­ti­ons on the iPhone (and I guess also on the iPad in the future). (Author’s note: Apple didn’t give per­mis­sion. Adobe just did it. That was their fun­e­ral. But now Apple forces deve­l­o­pers to only create apps with lan­gua­ges of their choice. And that’s their fun­e­ral, too. Their choice. Apple goes stron­gly for HTML5: On the Mobile Safari, with iAds, with iTu­nes LP and now with app deve­lop­ment in gene­ral. App­leIn­si­der men­ti­ons »mul­ti­tas­king« as the rea­son which means »per­for­mance«.) But: Apple will never sup­port Flash on web­sites. And this leads to my first point.

What Flash did was that it forced the brow­ser what the web para­digm doesn’t allow: It made the brow­ser behave application-like and not browser-like. For large app­li­ca­ti­ons this may be hel­pful, but the web isn’t there for large apps. The web is defined as links, open­ess and trans­pa­rency. Flash does application-GUI and clo­sen­ess.  Areas aren’t clicka­ble, context-menus fuck up and selec­tion of text, saving of images and all this stuff you expect from a web site is not working. You can­not just set an anchor — you have to code it. This is really import­ant to under­stand. Flash is a whole new app­li­ca­tion inside of an application.

Flash is the incar­na­tion of incon­sis­tency in beha­vior and design on a web site. Flash con­tent is just like Java app­lets in the early 00’s.

In addi­tion to the the „app­li­ca­tio­niza­tion“ there are two other very import­ant pro­blems: High CPU usage and plu­gin tech­no­logy. Brow­sers were not able to ren­der ani­ma­ti­ons by them­sel­ves in the past and even the stan­dards doing sta­tic stuff were just com­ing up — as always: Stan­dards are slow, but when they finally arrive they rock the parlor.

And this is why Flash-blocking ser­vices like ClickT­oF­lash became so popu­lar. Even if you’ve got a cur­rent com­pu­ter model, with 4 GB RAM and an awe­some pro­ces­sor — Flash will still crank up the CPU usage. Ever­y­thing is bet­ter than an „unsus­pec­ted crash“ of a plu­gin — even small blue legos. And these blue legos will go away over the next few months — big­ger plat­forms — and years.

Plu­gin tech­no­logy is on its way out. Maemo — by the way — drop­ped plu­gin sup­port on their Fire­fox port:

The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.

Jeff Zeld­man in words:

Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.

There is no rea­son for flash any­more. There is HTML5 for video, audio and all stuff you did in Flash and a huge impro­ve­ment on the Seman­tic Web. In addi­tion to CSS3 which brings great lay­out tech­ni­ques, ani­ma­tion, web fonts and stuff like that. And highly per­for­mant Java­Script (engines).

Ever­y­thing you can ima­gine and ever­y­thing which was done with Flash in the past is now avail­able for all modern brow­sers — of course also on the iPhone and all smart­pho­nes sup­porting HTML5, JS engi­nes and CSS3. Flash coders, who behave a bit like woun­ded deers, pos­ted some ideas where to replace Flash for the advan­tage of HTML5 and Java­Script.

HTML5 is open-standard, system-rendered and acces­si­ble. Flash isn’t able to offer only one piece of that.

This is per­for­mance, dude.

And please, Adobe, don’t loose the rest of the world by keeping your ears shut. It is not about fea­tures and updates, it is about the phi­lo­so­phy behind the web. And this phi­lo­so­phy isn’t com­pa­ti­ble to Flash.