If you haven’t heard yet, Adobe officially announced the end of Flash for mobile devices. In some quarters people immediately exclaimed “Steve Jobs was right!” Too bad he didn’t live to see it, after all those years of fighting Flash. But regardless of the Steve Jobs angle, I think this announcement is a good thing for developers for several reasons.
First and foremost, it ends the old “VHS versus Beta” quandary once and for all. Now instead of “wait and see,” or going down a path of obsolescence and continuing to invest in a dead-end technology, we all know into which basket to place our eggs. This allows all developers to get off the fence and start focusing in the same direction — towards HTML5 and open standards.
Additionally, with all developers moving down the same path, all of those resources will accelerate progress towards HTML5 as opposed to when resources and attention were divided. This will speed the adoption of newer technologies.
The announcement, in my opinion, is long overdue. Flash was breakthrough technology at the time (harkening back to it’s Macromedia days), but it’s past its prime. Flash is inherently un-indexable by the search engines, appearing as a big void in web pages. I’m sure I don’t have to comment on the incredible importance of search engine optimization in this blog, and having big pieces of content disappear in the eyes of the search engines is just bad business. And with mobile access accounting for a significant and increasing percentage of all web traffic, having a page load up sans-Flash elements on an iPad or other mobile device is just not acceptable.
Trust me, I know Flash’s value. Flash was the cornerstone to a multi-million dollar annual business I once ran. I “get” Flash. But I must also admit that Adobe has done a terrible job with the technology from a technical standpoint. Most end users see the “cool” results of Flash in action, but don’t realize what goes on under the hood (and thus never really understood Steve Jobs’ main issues with Flash). Flash is notoriously buggy, and a huge resource hog. When it crashes (as it constantly does) it looks like your browser crashed. Or Windows / Mac OSX. etc. The vast majority of the time when things run slow or crash entirely, end users blame the web site or the OS or the browser, never realizing that the *real* culprit is the Flash plugin! And on mobile, it just drains batter and resources way too fast — it’s a massive resource hog.
Adobe has been sprinting towards producing next-generation HTML5 development tools, in essence obsoleting its own technology. I do not begrudge Adobe the opportunity to make a buck. Not at all. I hope they make just as much money with their new HTML5 tools. I merely applaud the move to make the money from new HTML5 tools versus from Flash tools. And, in the process, allowing the industry at large to all start pulling in the same direction and accelerating the speed of adoption of these new open standards.
It’s good for the industry at large and for end users, who will see better, faster and more responsive web apps on both smartphones and desktops.
