While Steve Jobs revealed the iPad it became obvious that Flash isn’t supported within Mobile Safari on this device, too – just like on the iPhone – the whole web started to debate about if Flash is “the new Comic Sans” or just fell from grace but is 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). But: Apple will never support Flash on web sites. 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.
