Adobe today confirmed that it will be removing life support from its
barely breathing mobile Flash platform. Effectively, Adobe kills all
remaining hopes of some service providers that Flash will be surviving
and supporting existing applications for a few more years. Mobile
browsers are changing and will have to change at an even faster pace
along with this decision, which will alter the appearance and usage of
web apps within a few years.
Adobe’s announcement that Flash would not be continued to be developed in the future was not too surprising,
given the lack of compelling applications that could have advertised
the value of Flash on smartphones. Flash, for the most part, was merely
an annoyance if it was not available to show specific content, but there
have been typically ways around this problem via Smartphone apps. For
most of us, it simply does not matter whether Adobe keeps Flash mobile
breathing or not.
On Adobe’s side, it would be foolish to interpret the cancelation of
the platform as an admission of superiority of HTML5 and a late
concession that Steve Jobs was right that Flash is buggy, dangerous and a
terrible resource hog. The emergence of HTML5 may simply convinced
Adobe that it needs to allocate its own development resources much more
diligently and admit that Flash on smartphones was a race it could not
win. Adobe had to support way too many platforms with way too many
updates in an effort to keep pace with the standard cross-platform
functionality that HTML5 offers. In the end, it was a smart move and we
should be realistic that even Adobe’s commitment to the Flash desktop
platform is somewhat limited. Flash is a dying platform overall and
content developers need to have more than just one very good reason to
stick with Flash these days.
However, what makes the question of using Flash or HTML5 interesting
is the fact there is a considerable usage gap. HTML5, despite its
description of being supported on all platforms via the web browser, is
far from standardization and Google, Mozilla and Microsoft are having
their own ideas what should be part of HTML5 and what not – and what
features should be supported today. Only basic HTML5 looks the same in
every HTML5 browser today and mandates the same careful development of
interfaces and features as it has been the case ever since Microsoft
decided to significantly deviate from HTML standard with its IE3 browser
in the mid 1990s. HTML5 developers who take advantage of cutting edge
features, usually see that their content may look different, sound
different and will run at different speeds in different browsers,
especially if content takes advantage of hardware acceleration support.
This trend is even more apparent in mobile browsers than it is on the
desktop. By default, HTML5 support has to evolve at least as fast on
mobile devices as it does on the desktop and as we are seeing companies
such as Adobe to provide much more efficient HTML5 development tools, we
will also be seeing change in browsers. Google, for example, is still
preparing a release of Chrome for Android, which will be unifying much
of the desktop and the mobile browser interface. The buzz in the Chrome
revision log suggests that the browser is due for release at any time.
Mozilla has put considerably more effort in its mobile browser lately:
In some features the Android browser is even ahead of the desktop
version – for example, Firefox 8 Mobile already supports the addition of
web apps to its interface, while this feature will not arrive in the
desktop version until the end of January 2012.
Adobe’s decision to discontinue Flash for mobile devices will be
supporting this trend and accelerate the deployment of Flash. Adobe
could be assuming a critical role and help the standardization process
to accelerate by trying to create the default HTML5 app design tools.
Even without all standards in place today, the message to developers is
to start playing with HTML5 now.
Wolfgang Gruener in Business on November 09
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