In an ironic twist, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has written a post about Apple’s decision not to support flash on their mobile devices like iphones and ipads. Jobs paints a picture of flash as being outdated, restrictive, and designed for the “PC era”.
Many of his comments are a direct response to an article by Adobe about the future of Flash technology, which is their response to what others have been saying. Adobe says they’re open, secure, widely used, and supportive of innovation. Apple (and others) say they’re limiting, closed, insecure, and quickly being outdated by html5 and javascript advancements.
The irony of the situation is that Apple and Adobe have been like brothers in the software industry for years. Adobe’s products have always come hand-in-hand with Apple’s products. Things like native support for postscript and acrobat, and a mutual target market group of designers and artists have meant that these two companies thrived together.
Where do I stand?
Like many web developers, I agree with Apple’s decision and the bulk of what Jobs is saying in his letter. I don’t take the extreme position that some developers take when they make blanket statements like “no website should ever be made in flash” (trust me, I’ve heard this a few times). Flash is graphically rich, has sound, and can create extremely flexible and responsive web applications. Creating a professional website for a musician without flash is currently impractical unless you want to forget about playing music on the site for viewers without sufficient html5 support. It would be great if everyone used Firefox, but in practical terms, there are still 20% of people out there using ie6! Clearly we have quite a while before we can replace flash with something new.
But the fact of the matter is that flash is acting as a crutch until a better system can be adopted to do most of these things. Primarily video and audio. Adobe should accept the fact that a software level rendering environment for video is not the future, and that web developers are going to jump on the ability to put sound onto websites without having to publish it from CS4 (or CS5, or any proprietary development environment). Obviously we want the freedom to throw it up with a few lines of javascript, without the time consuming overhead. The reason we don’t is because we can’t, not because Flash is ideal.
Adobe cites some obviously biased figures about how 85% of the top 100 websites use flash. Having an optional flash component to throw some spice onto a website that could easily be replaced by html5 when it’s practical to do so is not looking ahead. Most of the flash I come across is already annoying and unnecessary, unviewable at work (where nobody gets flash to prevent them from watching youtube all day), blocked by noscript or adblocker, and could be replaced by a good jquery coder.
The future is that Flash will become relegated to what it’s actually best for: non-mobile, browser based applications like those goofy games where you hit a penguin with a club to see how far it will go. If Adobe is quick on the ball and manages to code it extremely well, flash might get well supported on mobile devices, but they’re taking too long to provide touch support, and they may never fully convince developers that it’s not a security risk to support it on that kind of platform.