One of the biggest complaints levelled at the iPad is that it lacks support for Adobe’s Flash. Flash is a software platform that allows addition of interactive web content and animation on the web. It is most commonly used to display video on the web and in the use of web applications such as games. Flash has become almost ubiquitous across the web and sites such as You Tube use flash to display video. Flash players are used to embed video in web sites.
Just prior to the launch of the iPad John Gruber presciently made a case that Apple would not include Flash support. In the piece he described Flash as the most common source of crashes in OS X. He also made a very good case for why Flash should never be included in the iPhone OS and, in fact, why Flash is bad for the web.
In the first place it runs terribly in OS X and is a real resource hog. Abode have argued that it is not their fault since OS X’s architecture prevents them from implementing it as they wish. The fact remains that watching Flash video will make processors labour while watching the same video in high quality via H.264 or another format will barely tax them.
Secondly, and I feel most importantly, Flash is a de facto web standard that is owned and controlled by one company. HTML, CSS and JazaScript are all standards. That is they are controlled by an independent body, the W3C, and are part of specifications for web browsers. Flash, and other content plug-ins, aren’t standards and putting them in the hands of one company is a bad idea.
Apple are not going to include Flash support. Adobe would like them to and some employees are trying to make a case by showing a range of web pages requiring Flash, including a porn site, as they might be rendered on the iPad. As Merlin Mann pointed out had the post included the pages rendering as Flash instead of a jpeg they might have looked quite different. However, it turns out that Adobe were being disingenuous when they made their mock-ups since of the 8 pages they target 6 are iPhone OS friendly or have equivalent apps in the app store.
This whole argument reminded me of the proprietary HTML tags employed by Microsoft that at one time were a de facto web standard. Remember when Safari was first released? There were pages such as Internet banking sites, shopping sites for some fairly big companies, online quoting systems and other similar sites that just wouldn’t work. Similarly these sites often wouldn’t work in Firebird (the ancestor of Firebox). I can’t remember the last time a site didn’t work in Safari or Firefox. Web designers and large companies want their content viewable by everybody. In the case of Safari companies were cutting off a frequently wealthy section of their clientele by not supporting Safari. Even Microsoft have embraced web standards with IE 8.
Although this came to me last night while arguing the point with a friend Robert Scoble seems to have been similarly inspired. He makes the point that web programmers are abandoning Flash in favour of standards they know will be displayed anywhere. As one of his commenters says Flash has been a fill-in while HTML caught up to supporting things like embeddable video. Well that time has come.
HTML 5 supports tags that allow the insertion of video. So far it is only supported in Safari and Chrome, but Google and Vimeo now have HTML 5 opt-in versions of their sites. What are iPhone/iPad users going to care if they can’t access Flash games? The App store is full of games that are far superior in their implementation and specifically designed to played by touch.
Flash is ready to become an irrelevancy. Flash was useful while it lasted and it won’t disappear overnight, but the bell is tolling and it tolls for Flash.
