Adobe Dumps Mobile Flash

Most frequent complaint about the iPhone? “Doesn’t support Flash.” You can also say that about Adobe after they announced it will no longer develop Flash for mobile devices.

Adobe had been hedging its bet on Flash by adding HTML5 elements in Dreamweaver and Illustrator, so you can see that Adobe saw this as somewhat inevitable. They knew all along that Flash was a bad product and for the most part always had been a processor hog, contained security flaws and was a proprietary system that was no longer necessary for streaming video or doing funny animations on a website.

I don’t use Dreamweaver anymore, and even when I did I thought that much of the features were not intuitive or particularly useful. It also generates some clunky code. I don’t use Flash, but I have used HTML5 and having an open standard is ultimately better for developers and users. Steve Jobs was the best known critic of Flash, but he was not alone.

Although HTML5 may not have gotten a boost with iOS not supporting Flash, it was rather obstinate of Jobs to not allow it on Apple’s mobile platform. Was Flash too much for an early iPhone to handle? Possibly, depends on your threshold for what you consider to be performance.

Flash is dead. Back in the early days of the Internet you needed it for multimedia, you just don’t need it any more. HTML5 will do everything that Flash did, except faster.


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