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Mozilla Web Development

On The Future Of Flash

Adobe is killing Flash, as a plugin for mobile. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who works on the web. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve bet on HTML5 since the beginning and haven’t been ashamed to say it. I don’t do Flash. To quote Adobe:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

I strongly suspect that even this use case is limited and will experience the same fate as the Flash plugin within the next 24-36 months. HTML5 is supported by browsers, a browser is shipped with the OS and is highly optimized for what it’s running on. It’s also the ultimate in cross-platform. Why write Flash when you can do something for every platform and not rely on a vendor to abstract you?

Platforms like PhoneGap bridge the world of Apps and HTML5 quite nicely. Adobe bought Nitobi which develops PhoneGap, but PhoneGap is also going to Apache Software Foundation which means Adobe’s ability to derail the project would be somewhat limited if they wanted to go that route.

Quite a few Apps use HTML/JS extensively already. HTML5’s success is despite Apple essentially crippling the use of HTML5 in native apps by preventing UIWebView from taking advantage of the Nitro engine. If/when Apple gets to fixing this another barrier will be gone. I suspect Apple will eventually make scrolling that doesn’t suck on iOS easier. Right now Joe Hewitt’s Scrollability is likely your best bet.

Adobe goes on to say:

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Interestingly they left out that little browser vendor Mozilla. Perhaps because they are most likely targeting WebKit on mobile and that’s the common tie between those companies sans-Microsoft which they need IE support. If Adobe wants a future here they should learn quick that you can’t ignore platforms. My advice to Adobe is to make sure their solution allows developers to bring their product to any modern browser on any device.

Flash is the last plugin with real usage even on the desktop. This is the first step towards the concept of plugins in the browser going away. It’s unlikely many will see a need to go HTML5 on mobile and develop a separate Flash code base to do the same thing on a desktop. The name of the game these days is write once, run anywhere (credit to Sun for the slogan). Today marks the start of the decline of Flash.

As Brendan Eich best put it: “Always bet on JavasScript“. I have and I continue to do so. The Open Web is winning. Slowly but surely.

3 replies on “On The Future Of Flash”

It will also have the effect of helping to accelerate holdouts to transition to modern browsers. When web developers target HTML5 from the get-go instead of investing into what is now a lame duck, those compelling sites won’t be so useful from IE6/7/8, FF 3.6, etc.

This was my first question when I read that Adobe’s article: why they didn’t mention Mozilla between the “key players in the HTML community”? They didn’t mention Mozilla, but Microsoft that has always been against web standards and RIM that is an unknown in this field… Is Adobe joking?

They were not ignoring the Mozilla platform they were just talking about major mobile devices. Firefox is just not that prevalent on Smartphones and Tablets.

Maybe plugin’s will die but then what will replace them are more proprietary technologies. It will be a battle between the various app stores and frameworks of Apple, Google, Microsoft (assuming they don’t scale back their Windows 8 ambitions) and whoever else has the installed base to matter. The web itself will be downplayed in favor of these corrugated app stores.

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