While Flash has always had its detractors, when Apple decided to intentionally exclude it from their iDevices some have speculated that Flash’s days may be numbered. Considering HTML 5 is right around the corner and offers the ability to deliver sound and video in an open format it is a logical conclusion to draw. However, many content developers have considerable investments in Flash content which means the platform isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. This article titled “6 reasons why Flash isn’t going away” brings up several interesting points:
- Supported by non-Apple mobile devices, with more support planned for the future.
- It does more than just video. This is actually a huge point… think of how many games and applets work on the Flash platform.
- Rich development tools for working with Flash.
- Potential licensing issues with HTML 5 codecs.
- As mentioned above, there is considerable investment in Flash applications.
After reading this, the author has some very valid points. So love it or hate it, Flash is probably going to be around for quite some time.
What do you think? Is Flash headed out the door or will it stick around for the foreseeable future?
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It’ll eventually die, and good riddance.
Apple is right about Flash. It blows. As readers know, I recently switched away from the Iphone and to an Android phone. So, now I can run Flash. Yippee. Only problem is that it is unstable as hell. Just last night, I had my phone freeze up twice because of a Flash-based ad on a particular website. I had to remove the damn battery to reboot the phone. So, I went into my settings and DISABLED Flash.
It is a piece of crap, and Apple was right to not let it on their phones. I have said that it’d be nice to have the option (an on/off kind of thing), but I’d still keep it off most of the time.
Whether or not you like flash it’s everywhere and apple doesn’t get it.Their always talking about how it is for security reasons if flash was such a big problem then why doesn’t linux have a problem with it, only Windows and Apple.Like I said before it’s everywere so apple is taking half the web away from viewers.So thats why everyone is going to Android and Apple is no longer top when it comes to smartphones
Nah. I had an Iphone for 2 years and it was very rare that I missed Flash. Very rare.
And the reason Iphone is no longer top is because of the forced tie to AT&T. It opened the door for competing phones on other networks without real competition there, because people are hesitant to sign with AT&T.
Eventually it’ll go away, but not before HTML 5 (or something) proves it can do the same things just as well. Or, at least good enough and stable enough to replace flash. With as much potential as there is in HTML 5, this isn’t a known yet.
Further, here’s the thing. As many people that hate Flash (which for sure, isn’t perfect), the biggest problem isn’t Flash, it’s lazy or just poor web developers. The difference with Flash than most of the web, it’s running predominantly on your PC, and not the server. So when it goes boom, it’s your PC, and not some big server.
What’s going to change with HTML 5? Will these lazy/crappy developers suddenly get better? Only if the technology is more fool proof to work with. But frankly, the farther away developers get from the “blood and guts” of the PC the less general understanding they have. In other words – I doubt it.
No, the reason why Apple doesn’t support flash is becaause it would directly compete with itunes and the app store. They’re spouting nonsense about how flash is to buggy and old to implement while the real reason is as always, money. If Apple supported flash then their vaunted app store would crumble. 250,000 apps do not compare to the amount of flash applications. Furthermore, Apple always has grief with using software not developed or owned by them. Oh and David what phone do you have because flash is not buggy on my Droid?