Adobe’s Flash player has had various trips to A&E over the years, from promising beginnings in the late 1990’s it soon floundered as a bloaty “intro” page builder that the search engines could not read. It was absolutely destined to die a quick and painless death.
And then along came video. Youtube and a few other video hosting sites successfully used Flash to deliver content and all seemed well in the world of Flash. Except, it’s a still a crummy system that’s difficult to maintain, not standards based and certainly not supported by W3C or any other standards body.
Apple have refused flatly to support it but it has Quicktime as it’s “player” and clearly doesn’t want to give support away to Adobe without a fight. Adobe claim Flash is supported on nearly 100% of operating systems, but so does the command line interpreter and most people would never consciously use that. Not one of my “non-tech savvy” mates had ever heard of flash or even knew how video worked on a PC.
The fight has recently escalated with the formation of the Open Video Alliance and Wikipedia’s refusal to support flash. The final nail in the coffin is likely to be hammered in by Apple’s iPad, due on these shores in the next month and the new device will not be supporting Flash, according to Steve Jobs who claims Adobe’s software is a “CPU hog”, a source of “security holes” and an “old technology” that needs to be replaced. (From Nexus 404)
If you use flash on your laptop you’ll see the problem yourself, the fan is always hammering away flat-out and the battery indicator becomes fairly useless as you appear to speed through time. We, at Connected, hope that Flash dies a painful, quick death by jumping off Vista Bridge… preferably holding hands with Internet Explorer 6.
