Last month one of the most influential figures in technology, Steve Jobs, personally wrote a blog about his thoughts on Flash. Steve’s thoughts are important because as the CEO of Apple they transcend down into one of the most popular mobile phones of our generation, the iPhone, and also the iPad, iPod, Safari browser, Macintosh computers and everything else Apple has to offer.
What’s the big deal with Flash? Flash is Adobe’s cross platform multimedia system and allows your web pages to contain animation, whether it is advertisements, videos, or actual applications such as games. Flash has long been the prominent tool for media on the internet and has only recently come under heavy fire, most notably from Steve Jobs. Apple and Adobe have an extensive history and its estimated 50% of Mac users account for the sales of Adobe’s creative products but the mixed interest ends here.
In a time when mobile browsing is common place and ever growing it’s important for web developers and clients to produce and maintain websites that will run on handheld devices and more importantly, the most popular devices, which just so happens to be devices produced by Apple. Apple’s policy of not shipping or enabling the use of third party runtime environments means that Flash is struggling to infiltrate the mobile market of which the iPhone claims 60% and the mobile device market of which the iPod accounts 95%….and with the iPad shipping the problem grows. The result means Flash can’t fully be considered a ubiquitous mobile platform even with recent approved support from Android, Pal and Blackberry due to the governance of the mobile market reigned by Apple.
So why isn’t Steve Jobs a fan? Well Steve believes that the use of open standards with relation to web is the way forward and criticises Adobes base of completely propriety products but acknowledges Apple’s own amount of products being heavily propriety. Steve highlights the use of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript as opposed to Flash, or more simply put, the use of open standard web technologies emerging in the world of web development. The use of these standards allows the creation of animations, transitions and rich graphics and typography effects and it’s considered may possibly take away much of the need for Flash and make a number of other rich Internet application (RIA) technologies obsolete.
The second major point highlighted by Steve regarding video especially is that approximately 75% of video on the web is in Flash, most of which now has H.264 support, which is viewable on all of Apples mobile devices. A vast majority of web videos are compressed in the modern format, H.264, including all of videos on the YouTube site, which it is claimed contains approximately 40% of all web videos. However although Flash now has H.264 support a large percentage of flash websites use a previous generation decoder not implemented in mobile chips requiring it to be run on software, heavily affecting the battery life of mobile devices, in the case of the iPhone it’s been said to halve battery life. So it seems Flash video is indeed more viewable on Apples mobile devices thanks to H.264 support but contrastingly at the expense of your mobile battery life.
So what else did Steve speak of? Well, the widely known problems with Flash crashing Macs were addressed. For anyone who’s used Safari or owned a Mac you will probably be all too familiar with a ‘Flash Crash’. It just so happens to be the most common cause of Mac crashes and has persisted for many years even after nearly as many years have been spent trying to rectify the problems from both Apple and Adobe respectively. He also acknowledged Adobes failure to put Flash on a mobile device for nearly two years after they claimed a mobile device would ship with it on, this is currently taking place via Android phones but it’s a good job Apple didn’t hold their breath.
Another interesting and logical point made by Steve was that Flash was designed for PC’s and mice and not with touch screen in mind. We’re all familiar of Flash pop ups that appears as we hover the mouse over specific parts of a website, well with Apple’s touch screen offerings there’s no concept of a ‘rollover’ as it’s known and no use of a mouse. So basically, what Steve is saying is that most Flash websites require rewriting to support touch based devices and if this is the case then why don’t they just do so in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript? It seems to make a lot of sense.
Steve’s final problem with Flash and the most important to Steve was regarding Adobe’s focus on developers adopting Flash to create apps that work and run on Apple’s mobile devices. Steve himself understands to his annoyance the problems of third party layers of software between platforms and developers. On the whole Steve stressed Adobes extremely slow adoption of the enhancements to Apples platforms and in general the ‘laziness’ of Adobe. Steve concluded that Adobes Flash offering is just not up to scratch with the requirements of the mobile era and brought to attention the overwhelming offerings of content from media outlets received by Apple, rendering Flash apparently redundant.
The co-creator of Adobe’s Flash software, Jonathan Gay was quick to point out that Apple, it appears, underestimate some features of the open standards such as HTML5 and believes it’ll be far from as rich a media platform as Flash is today. With Google’s latest phones having support for Flash and similar interest in the pipeline, the guys at Adobe don’t seem as worried as one may expect but neither party denies the likely benefits that the use of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript will bring to the web. Adobe, and other major RIA vendors are involved with W3C’s HTML5 efforts but defend the needs for their own technologies and it seems they all point out quite rightly it will be as long as ten years until HTML5 is finalised and in that time the Flash platform will may have evolved to deliver a ubiquitous, stable platform that is even richer. Steve Jobs certainly doesn’t think so.
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