ZDnet has learned that Adobe plans on ditching their existing Flash Mobile platform to refocus on HTML5. Lots of us have had love/hate relationships with Flash, but no one more so than Apple. The hardware giant refused to support Flash on their mobile devices and often blamed the multimedia delivery solution for problems on the desktop as well ( I, for one, have had issues with Flash and Google Chrome).
Adobe, on their part, handled the situation by being passive-aggressive.
Recent years have seen Android and webOS show that you can indeed run Flash without destroying your mobile device. However, Apple’s industry dominance (among other factors) has led most sites to switch to HTML5. Perhaps the strongest indicator is how many adult sites (and no, I won’t link you) have switched to HTML5. The adult industry is a serious indicator of where technology is heading, generally speaking. On a more family-friendly note, multimedia juggernauts YouTube and Pandora, for example, now run entirely in HTML5.
The new Pandora looks amazing on the TouchPad
I’ll be blunter than usual — this is a long time coming. Using any programing language that requires an additional plug-in and a closed standard is bad design. Adobe should have seen the writing on the wall ages ago. The only excuse I can think of is that the wall used Flash and they were on an iPhone.
Update: It’s official.
I rather like flash. Not a lot of web browsing on mobile devices, so ditching Flash on mobile is probably for the best. Mobile devices change and technologies improve so developing for these different and ever-expanding product lines would seem expensive and cumbersome.
Flash wil peter out. HTML 5 and beyond are free. Developers are going to stick with Flash for a while, it’s more powerful and easier, and there’s more to it than playing movies.
But see, I think separating the browsing experience from desktop to mobile is not a good thing.
Hang on a minute here.
Sites are “adopting” HTML5 for those browsers that support it. Those of us who are lucky enough to have html5-compatible browsers will get better performance out of it than Flash, and no one is denying that.
But make no mistake, they are not completely ditching Flash. According to market research from persicopic.com, only 40% of internet users are on HTML5 compatible browsers, as opposed to 99% using Flash compatible. HTML5 may have many benefits, but the desktop browsing world runs on Flash, and probably will for a while still.
YouTube and those pornographic sites that you mention here are STILL using flash. They just offer HTML5 for those who prefer it, or are using popular mobile devices like the iPad, so that they don’t alienate visitors.
Pandora, meanwhile, still uses Flash EVEN ON THEIR HTML5 REDESIGN! A quick quote from Gizmodo on Pandora’s new page: “One small complaint is that the site still requires Flash for ads despite the switch to HTML5, and disabling it seems to break the site. Which is very annoying. Still, check it out.”
And this is why Adobe’s announcement makes me sad. I’ve always wanted my mobile browsing experience to be as similar as possible to the desktop one. I don’t want watered down web pages that are missing features I’m looking for. If the entire web were to move to HTML5 overnight, that would be a different story. But since the desktop browsing world is still very much stuck in the world of Flash, all this announcement means is that Adobe will be encouraging the segregation of Mobile versus Desktop browsing. This would appear to be a large step in the WRONG direction, in my opinion.
It’s amazing how Jobs is still changing the world after his departure. What a life!!!