The Tech Night Owl has an interesting article about how Apple is helping kill Adobe Flash. Recently, more and more websites have been either removing Flash from their sites or creating a second non-Flash version. This is in response to many smartphones not supporting Flash due to it’s high CPU consumption.
Help kill Adobe Flash by doing the following:
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video: feedback@hulu.com
From Tech Night Owl:
In 1998, Apple killed the floppy drive. It took a few years for the rest of the industry to catch up, but the handwriting was clearly on the wall. Of course, anyone who actually lost data on a worn or defective floppy would only cheer the end of that flawed storage scheme.
Segue to 2007. Apple introduces the iPhone without support for Flash. People complain, but iPhones sell at ever-increasing rates. Today, with some 40 million of them around the world, and the iPad on the immediate horizon, Steve Jobs has made it quite clear that Flash is the floppy drive of the 21st century. It’s time for it to go.
Now there have been lots of complaints from the tech media, but you have to wonder whether some of those stories were actually fed by Adobe’s spin machine. Sure, the players are given away free, but you have to pay for the developer tools, and that’s where Adobe earns lots of money. Indeed they bought Macromedia to get Flash and — of course — kill Illustrator’s main competitor, FreeHand.
Yes, it’s true that the lack of Flash on Apple’s mobile gear means that many sites will not look right. Whether navigation menus, introductory videos or special features, you won’t be able to access all the available content.
Adobe takes the position that they are working on a version of Flash that will better support mobile platforms, with improved support for multitouch, which is where the existing version fails badly. Maybe that’ll happen, but Steve Jobs is not likely to backtrack on his decision. He’s already accused Adobe’s developers of being “lazy,” and complained that Flash is the number one cause of crashes on Macs.
You’ll note that, with Snow Leopard, browser plugins are sandboxed, so if they crash, it’s not accompanied by the application itself. In fact, 90% of the very few crashes I’ve encountered since installing Snow Leopard last August were, in fact, caused by Flash. Read more
