In the eternal battle for Web supremacy, one of the major warriors just laid down its weapons. Adobe confirmed this morning that it will cease all development of mobile versions of Flash. That means that Android, BlackBerry OS, and other devices that had touted Flash capability as one of their key selling points will soon no longer matter.
The timing of this was interesting, because I had been conducting my own private experiment over the course of the past month with my MacBook. Some time ago, after much troubleshooting (including a complete rebuild), I realized that whenever I used Google Chrome, the MacBook ran unacceptably hot, and the promised seven-hour battery life shrunk to as little as three hours. It turned out that Google Chrome was kicking in the MacBook's discrete graphics chip, as well as putting more strain on the CPU overall.
Perplexed at this problem, I looked into it further and found that in order for Apple to get its latest round of upgraded battery life figures with the 2011 MacBook Pros, it tested them using Safari, which by default doesn't come with Adobe Flash preinstalled. Google Chrome does. So for the next month, I decided to see what it was like to use Safari, and without Flash, on a regular basis on my laptop—something that iPad and iPhone users are already used to, obviously, but a different experience on the desktop.
(Note: You can still use Google Chrome with Flash disabled. To do so, type about:plugins in the Location Bar, and click Disable next to Flash.)
The result was surprising: For the most part, it didn't matter. I read a lot of news sites, both general and tech. The only time I've run into trouble is trying to view videos, and only on some sites (like CNN). Less often, I've also had to load Chrome to view photo slideshows, but again, it was site-dependent. Advertising took a hit, as much of it is coded in Flash, but that's to be expected—and obviously not a huge loss from a reader's standpoint!
But it showed that Web developers are already moving away from Flash to HTML5. YouTube has an HTML5 mode (albeit in beta). HTML5 doesn't do as much as Flash on the programming side, but it's getting there. Besides, developers want their sites to work on the iPhone and iPad—which brings us to Apple.
Flash Ill-Suited for Mobile Devices
Steve Jobs famously called out Adobe Flash's poor performance in an article posted on Apple's Web site in early 2010. That set the blogosphere ablaze, and sparked a surprisingly public back-and-forth between Adobe and Apple. The thing was, Jobs wasn't playing favorites just to reduce Adobe's dominance on the Web (although that was obviously a nice side effect). He was pointing out that Flash just never worked very well on mobile devices. It was a power hog, it was sluggish, and in my experience, about as reliable as a '77 AMC Pacer with a brown door.
We've seen it over and over again in our reviews. I was beginning to dread each new iteration of Flash, as various Android phones hit my desk with the latest improvements, none of which seemed to help as much as they should.
With Flash gone on the mobile side, it's likely that we'll begin to see it disappear on the desktop as well. It's the same conundrum developers always face: how many platforms do you want to run your product on, with all the extra time, money, QA, employee skills, training, and technical support that comes with it? If you can get what you need done with HTML5, which current browsers support out of the box, do you want to be dependent on external plug-in installs that you have no control over?
For its part, Adobe will still continue to be tremendously relevant across the broad, with Photoshop, Illustrator, its Web development tools, and a renewed focus on HTML5, where it can easily soar. For years, I had been impressed with Adobe on the mobile development side, where it took the lead early by releasing a set of tools to optimize mobile sites as far back as early 2007, which I covered at CTIA that year. As Technologizer's Harry McCracken points out, Adobe had been talking about mobile Flash now for more than a decade, which in the realm of vaporware, puts it roughly equivalent to Duke Nukem' Forever. (And we all see how well that turned out in the end.)
Flash served its purpose for a long time. It brought us a more powerful Web, and helped shift it from its hypertext-based roots to something far more interactive and useful, beginning as early as the late 1990s. And now, Flash's time has officially passed—on mobile devices and otherwise.
For more from Jamie, follow him on Twitter: @jlendino.