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Thoughts on Flash
Some time ago Steve Jobs (the Apple dude.. for people that lived under a rock for thirty years) posted his thoughts on Flash letter that features the Apple home page, were in he explains why the iPad and iPhone don’t support Flash.
And when I first read it I didn’t really take it serious because Apple (and Jobs) have nagged before about other stuff they didn’t make. But how more I thought about Flash I realized he does have a point, Flash has issues. So here are my thoughts on Flash.
The only use of Flash I think is for video and audio. The rest is doable with Javascript (or with the new CSS3 transitions), and the stuff that’s not possible with Javascript is not-needed-stupid-overdone-animation-fancy-stuff show-off-effects. But now with the new and awesome HTML5 we have the open video standard and is Flash not needed anymore. In fact I never liked and never used Flash, simply because I didn’t see the need.
And then I read this article on zdnet.com were they say Flash is the new Vista, and that makes sense. Flash has a lot of technical issues, security, performance, and reliability. Since I use Chrome Flash has crashed a lot of times, and when I use Linux (Ubuntu with Firefox) it doesn’t work properly most of the times. So no use and not working properly…
Flash isn’t great, but Apple should have supported it on iPhone and iPad. Why? Because a lot of people use it. It’s sort of discrimination. Also there is a solutionfor not actually running it on the device itself, run the flash on a server and only pass the result to the device. This technique is used for years by the Skyfire mobile browser, currently available for Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian.
There is no future for Flash, but it’s still used. So we just have to live with it. Maybe 10.1 will give us some improvement but I have not much hope. Let’s just wait some time till the majority of people browse with the new HTML5, and place Flash in the museum of the internet.
Keep frying!
