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Somewhere
Steve Jobs must be smiling.
As you
may have heard, Adobe last week admitted defeat in its
long-running battle with Apple over Adobe’s Flash
technology. As Apple’s CEO, the late Jobs barred Flash
from Apple’s iPhone and other handheld devices and
famously wrote an open letter last year explaining why.
Jobs
complained that Flash was a buggy, insecure battery hog
that wasn’t designed for touch devices like the iPhone
and — thanks to the advent of new, more open
technologies — had outlived its usefulness. Belatedly,
Adobe seems to have come to the same conclusion.
The
company announced that after an upcoming update, it
would cease development of its Flash player software for
mobile gadgets. Instead it plans to focus on HTML5, the
same technology that Jobs touted last year.
This is a
big retreat for Adobe. The company is abandoning mobile
Flash little more than a year after it released it —
and after spending years developing it. And the core of
its new mobile strategy is a technology that just last
year Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief technology officer,
said wouldn’t be able to replace Flash “in the
foreseeable future.”
I guess
we can say unequivocally that Jobs’ foresight was a
lot keener than that of the folks at Adobe.
For
consumers, this is a welcome move because it should mean
that the Web browsing experience on mobile devices is
going to get a lot better.
The
promise of mobile Flash was that users would have the
same Web experience, regardless of whether they were
accessing a Web page from a PC, tablet or smartphone.
But the
reality of mobile Flash was much different than its
promise. Flash-based videos and games are often slow to
load on mobile devices. Some of the older Flash content
can’t be played in the mobile Flash player. And many
Flash-based video websites block access to their content
from mobile devices — even if those devices are
running Flash. In sum, the experience was much worse
than what you’d get on your PC.
I had
eagerly anticipated mobile Flash and was disappointed
that Apple didn’t include the technology on the iPad.
But after playing with mobile Flash, I realized I
hadn’t been missing much.
As any
iPhone or iPad user knows, you can do plenty of things
without Flash. Most Web videos these days can be viewed
without a Flash player, and most of the major websites
don’t require it. And with all the games available in
the Apple App Store, Apple device owners aren’t
missing Flash games.
Adobe’s
decision to kill off mobile Flash will push developers
to ensure that all websites and content are
mobile-friendly.
My
biggest quibble with Adobe’s move is that it doesn’t
go far enough. I’d like to see Adobe kill Flash on the
desktop also.
Flash was
a crucial technology during the past decade. While the
browser makers were fighting over Web standards and
companies like Apple, Microsoft and RealNetworks were
battling over how to deliver streaming audio and video,
Flash provided something of a lingua franca.
It
allowed users to view dynamic Web pages no matter what
browser they were running or operating system they were
using. It allowed consumers to play games directly
within Web pages. And it became a standard way for
delivering streaming media, freeing users from worrying
about whether they had the right version of QuickTime or
Windows Media Player to listen to a Web broadcast.
But the
times have passed Flash by. Web standards have become
more sophisticated and more widely supported. Developers
can now stream video and audio, and offer sophisticated
applications and dynamic menus without resorting to
Flash.
Meanwhile,
the downsides of Flash have become more and more
apparent. In short, Jobs was right. In part because of
its ubiquity, Flash has become an inviting target for
hackers; the software has become one of the biggest
security vulnerabilities on PCs.
What’s
more frustrating on a daily basis is just how unstable
Flash is. Flash crashes my browser nearly every day —
and that’s on a Windows machine, where the software is
supposedly more robust. Anecdotes from other users
indicate my experience is not unique.
In
defending Flash from Jobs’ attack last year, Adobe
co-founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke painted the
dispute as one about freedom, openness and consumer
choice. Adobe’s move is a recognition that consumers,
platform operators and developers are choosing to flee
Flash to embrace an even more open technology and some
other important freedoms, such as being liberated from
Flash’s crashes and security holes.
So I’ll
be glad to see Flash go away. Somewhere Jobs is saying,
“I told you so.”
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