Let me start out by saying that I have never liked Flash. I begun playing around with web development when it was in it infancy. Playing with HTML and making simple and crude web pages. I remember when Flash first arrived on the scene, back when it wasn’t bundled with your computer when you purchase it. I can remember the first websites that were built using Flash and users being asked to download and install this plugin in order to view the website. I didn’t like it from the start, it felt contrary to what I believed the web should be. A plugin made by one company needed to view a website. I hated the fact that it broke common browser functions, like the back button and history feature. As web search grew, I disliked the fact that search engines couldn’t crawl Flash based websites.
So after all these years I am very happy to see that Flash, at least as a plugin, is going to die. It’s the way it should be. Websites should be displayed by the web browser. They should be able to downgrade gracefully on older systems that don’t support newer features (one of the best aspects of HTML & CSS based design). It should not be an all or nothing solution dependent on development of one company.
Because of Apple’s success with the iPhone a lot of fuss has been made about their refusing to bundle Flash on the iPhone and on the iPad. A lot of this is exaggerated by the media which loves to focus on the top dog. However the demise of Flash lies strictly in the hands of Adobe. While people try to put the blame all on Apple, they forget that Flash for mobile devices wasn’t even fully ready until several generations of iPhones had been released. It wasn’t until the iPhone 4 was on the market that competing phones started getting Flash and even then it was described as buggy at best. All of this giving weight to Steve Jobs famous memo on flash, which was nothing but brutally honest.
I have a belief that when you build software, either programs or websites, you sometimes need to look at what you have built and then tear it down completely and rebuild it from scratch. Code becomes bloated, and after years of updates you find yourself with unnecessary bit of information. This is certainly true for Flash, it was designed for an age when computers operated differently and is stuck supporting legacy systems.
Adobe’s announcement is great news. Flash will live on doing what it does best, being used for games and applications. While the plugin version will slowly start to fade away. Web developers should embrace this news, and embrace HTML5 because it’s not only the future, but also a better way of delivering a lot of the content delivered through Flash.
