Steve Jobs (apparently) doesn’t like Adobe. He called them lazy and says that Flash is buggy and causes systems to crash. Flash is notoriously slow on a Mac and in its 3 year existence the iPhone has never supported it, now it appears the iPad won’t support it either. Apple lovers better get ready to see a lot of blue Lego blocks.
Though, according to Jobs, this needn’t be a cause for concern; HTML5 is coming to the rescue. Driven by the w3 Consortium, it promises to be a worthy successor to Flash. It can handle complex screen interactions in a similar way to Flash. Have a look at these experiments for the best performance try running them in Chrome.
Which brings us to the next point, Google doesn’t have a great love for Adobe either; the nature of their products makes it more difficult for their search engine to identify content. They have certainly optimised their own browser, Chrome, to focus on JavaScript and HTML5. Strangely it appears that Apple and Google are on the same side on this one.
One place Adobe seems safe is video: Video platforms like Youtube, iPlayer and Vimeo all use Flash to deliver their videos, Adobe have practically taken over from Real, Windows Media and Quicktime. Though HTML5 has thought of this and can run video too; YouTube and Vimeo are already experimenting with new players.
And it doesn’t end there, one potential problem with HTML5 is that Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support it, so it Microsoft are drawn into it as well. Google are blaming the elderly browser for its recent security breach and are lobbying governments and large institutions to phase out the browser and let it die in peace, thus releasing the developer community from having to support it and making the world a happier and more secure place.
So what will Microsoft do?
They have said they are going to continue to support IE6 for several years yet, but will they bow to the pressure of Google and the developer community? What about their own platform, Silverlight? Does holding up HTML5 give them a chance to push that a bit more? Is this getting complicated or what? It’s like a crazy web with four spiders pulling strands in different directions and IE6 as the lynch pin.
Who knows how long it will be until something gives? Not me that’s for sure.
First image courtesy of starchild1.co.uk/shadowfax/?p=1552
Second image courtesy of http://theflashblog.com/images/ipud.jpg
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Only one thing worse than finding a bug in your Apple. Listening to your Apple blame the bugs on everybody else
I wouldn’t have an Apple product in my pocket, bag or house.
YouTube and iPlayer both work fine on my Flash free phone, and Vimeo are (slowly) catching up on H.264 support as well. There are areas where Flash will continue to be the best choice for rich interactive experiences, but streaming video is one thing that really doesn’t need to rely on Flash in the future.
Interesting times ahead for sure. HTML5 has great potential if Mozilla, Google and Microsoft can agree on video codecs. Unlikely as this may be.
It is nicely backwards compatible for those used to coding in XHTML, and provides enough new cool stuff to make it worth using (better microformats support for example). Also as it’s not a plugin you don’t get the memory bloat that Flash can suffer from, or worrying about which version is installed.
Having said that, with Adobe’s CTO speaking out against seeing HTML5 as a panacea, I’d predict they’d blink first before Apple. Their plans to release a packager so Flash content can easily be ported into iPhone /iPad apps or Apple friendly video formats would suggest this:
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/building_ipad_apps.html
If I was a betting man would say this won’t be resolved any time soon.
I’d hardly say Google and Apple are the same when it comes to Flash. Apple are on their own by imposing tight restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Google’s Android OS isopen source giving content producers and consumers complete freedom, and that includes Flash support. Go Flash! Go!