Adobe is finally giving up on Flash in mobile browsers, according to Jason Perlow at ZDNet.

  • http://profiles.google.com/efdisaster John Voegtlin

    HTML wins. The great 10+ year cold war between HTML and Flash web developing is coming to an end. Flash has finally forfeit. “Adobe… refocuses effort on HTML5″

    • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

      Another side to my question is will they find a way to make their HTML5 development platform worth the premium cost?

    • petertrepan

      Now comes the cold war between competing HTML5 standards and codecs. :)

    • Bobdotcom

      “Adobe… refocuses effort on HTML5″
      Which they’ll likely bugger up as well.

    • http://darkmobius.com Andrew Molloy

      Ummm they’re giving up on the Flash player for mobile devices, that’s not quite synonymous with giving up on Flash. If you read the article they’re pushing AIR for mobile which is actually Flash based for the most part, and there’s 3D hardware accelerated Flash for the desktop which doesn’t compete with HTML at all. Flash web development is bigger now than it ever was, I see that every day with the current big project contract requirements in my industry. If you’re a flash developer today there are actually more publishing possibilities and uses of that technologies and languages (Actionscript, MXML) than ever before.

  • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

    Flash has recently become more unstable and slow for me on several different platforms… is HTML 5 likely to diminish its use, or is there still going to be a big advantage to using it in a wide variety of circumstances?

  • daneyul

    We won Steve! We finally beat the bastards! 

    …Steve?

    • kehfysik

      Your Venn diagram of bastards is different from mine.

    • Guest

      So the holding out -WAS- personal!

      I thought so. Nobody calculates such bad decisions.

  • http://twitter.com/dcturner ☞ DcTurner

    Bleargh, I abandoned the iPhone last month and have been enjoying the freedom of having a flash enabled browser – I can click on any video I like, free of codec / support issues.

    Until html5 has a standardised video format, I will see it as a step backwards. It’s exactly the same reason that flash video took off in the first place – it got around all the mess and codec squabbles involved in watching a video online.

    I welcome 99% of the flash -> html5 changeover, but with games and video we’re not there yet, and anyone who says otherwise is probably not a developer.

    Ah well, it’s not like this is the first time an inferior solution has won out. After all, people buy Apple products AMIRITE??

    oooooooh troll :)

    • Michael Kaltenecker

      The web has a de-facto standardized video format and it’s h.264. Android and iOS can play it natively. If someone offers HTML5 video they will be offering at least h.264. 

      • http://twitter.com/dcturner ☞ DcTurner

        You might want to tell the rest of the web then. h.264 is a proprietary format, not free, not standardised. People still have to choose between h.264, OGG and hey, even Quicktime (a web plugin that Apple likes, so that’s cool).

        This doesn’t even address the functionality issues – no good solution exists for ad-serving html5 content, UI overlays, live streaming, captions, p2p streaming.  It’s still early days, and flash (at the moment) is still the better suited platform in my opinion.

        Html will absolutely catch up, but it’s not the better tech at the moment.

        • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JOFGTXJNVJOV2HSH6XRG5DAMXQ r

          Yeah, I’m real disappointed I can’t get Flash ads delivered to my mobile device.

          • http://twitter.com/dcturner ☞ DcTurner

            Well you’ll get plenty of swanky animated html ads, don’t worry about that (without the easy ad-blocking too)

            What I’m talking about is ad-serving video. You know, monetising video content -> getting paid when people view your work.

          • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JOFGTXJNVJOV2HSH6XRG5DAMXQ r

            Yeah, this is a real tragedy. I’m sure no one will figure out how to make that work.

          • http://twitter.com/dcturner ☞ DcTurner

            That’s sort of the point, someone has to figure it out. Missing functionality – someone will figure it out – *again*

          • Guest

            If everything is about getting paid, you’re not an Apple user. 

          • daneyul

            Yeah, you’re just Apple.

          • http://twitter.com/dcturner ☞ DcTurner

            wow…  

    • Nick Hayday

      An inferior solution won years ago, Steve even admitted it…..Windows

      • http://twitter.com/dcturner ☞ DcTurner

        Boom!  hehe. 

        You crazy kids these days with your GUIs, I surf my webs via the command line :)

  • s2redux

     Oh lordy, Santa just left Gruber a stocking full of Viagra.

  • teapot

    Yeah.. get a phone that respects the fact that you own and have full control of it and you won’t have a problem with flash. All the wanky, sweeping emotional advertising in the world still won’t make your device effectively handle the range of formats the web is built from.

    Its also nice being able to dump whatever vids or files I want on it without reformatting them in some particular container. Oh, and being able to access the only part of any device guaranteed to fail at some point (battery) is handy. Form means nothing to me compared to versatility and function.

  • http://doran.pacifist.net/ Doran

    Flash is the only thing which crashes my machine. I’ll be glad when it’s gone completely.

    • http://twitter.com/no_other_alias Alias Cummins

      Not seen much WebGL then, I guess!

  • GTMoogle

    Clearly what this indicates is that Adobe was just trolling Steve all along, but now the jokes over.

  • dolo54

    HTML5 is going to be awesome! Nothing better than developing and debugging on 10-20 odd platforms/configurations instead of 1. It’s going to be so much fun waiting for a slow, laborious consortium to approve new web standards, and then waiting for browsers to partially implement differing subsets of those standards little by little until we can finally use those new standards in the real world. I just hope I live long enough to see HTML5 adapted by everyone http://www.webmonkey.com/2008/09/html_5_won_t_be_ready_until_2022dot_yes__2022dot/

  • JimEJim

    It performs crappy, but the idea of flash was never that bad.  It was consistent and actually worked cross-platform for the most part, which is more than you can say for some of it’s competitors.  It’s unfortunate that Adobe was not competent enough to make it more stable.

    HTML (every version) will continue to have the problem of different browsers deciding to interpret the standard however they see fit, and Apple, for all its lip service, will do its part to make its version incompatible with other browsers, just like Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google. 

    The death of Flash is not necessarily a good thing.  We’re still in for plenty of headaches, as others have already pointed out with the video formats, just to begin.