The iPad Will Be the Death of Flash

Sat 30 January 2010 Category: Uncategorized

So Apple finally released their tablet computer: the iPad. One of the most debated drawbacks is that it lacks support for Adobe Flash. The iPhone does not support Flash either, and since the iPad is based on the iPhone OS, this should not come as a surprise.

Now many people see this as a serious problem. There are a slew of websites that cannot be viewed on an iPad for this reason.

However, the thing is this: Flash sucks. It is a proprietary technology under the control of Adobe and the only reason it is currently popular is that it provides a kind of standard for video playback across all browsers and operating systems. But it still sucks. It crashes. It is shit.

The iPhone is immensely popular, despite the lack of flash. The iPhone user base is huge. By using Flash in your website, you are excluding a large population of potential visitors. So this is what will happen: websites will start dumping Flash. The iPhone and the iPad will together kill Flash.

And that is a good thing for everybody, especially for proponents of open standards and open formats. Oh irony, that it will take a closed proprietary platform to do so.

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