Excellent – well done for pointing this out to the world and exposing Jobs’s horrible strategy. It remains my hope that flash lives longer than he does.

But… but… but… the iPhone 4 just got A-listed, and that doesn’t support Flash, so, right, er, either Flash or the iPhone 4 must be rubbish. Right? Right?

I think this is a great article, but does expose what should have been more specifically mentioned as a downside to the iPhone. Just to get that particular debate going again…

Excellent article. HTML5 is a great addition to a web developers toolkit. But any top-end web dev has came to realise that HTML5 isn’t a Flash replacement, and this article highlights why the two are very different. If Flash dies it should be because users vote with their feet, not because of some megalomaniac. It’s all about Steve Jobs and Apple trying to make as much money as they can, and if that means the web has to take a backwards step for their own profits – well, I guess that’s acceptable to them – and to hell with the end user I guess. Fairly awful behaviour.

This is the most cogent article I have read on the subject. Unfortunately, the survival of Flash now rests on the commercial success of Apple’s devices.

@Tony – definitely trying to stoke the debate, but not for the debate’s sake. I really do believe the future nature of the Web is in the balance.

@Jay – Flash will be around for a long while yet but any web medium needs to be universally accessible and the new mobile/slate market will be the most important market for content consumption as Apple appreciates.

@Andy – I am also baffled at the lack of popular protest (though as the piece shows it is a complex issue). Certainly if Bill Gates had tried to do the same he would have been pilloried and forced to backtrack.

@Steve – the iphone and ipad are wonderful devices. They would be even better with Flash support.

@Pixel Crayons – thanks and please spread the word.

@Sammie – that’s about it in a nutshell, though I’m a bit more sceptical about HTML5

@David – again you seem to think that I’m saying do everything in Flash rather than HTML. I’m not. It’s horses for courses, unless one of the courses is closed down.
I don’t think the best cross-platform platform for reading, consuming, doing, engaging etc is a niche. Also the advanced examples of HTML5 you cite open up similar issues of performance, security etc but spread across every browser. Moreover the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft have the talent and resources to move HTML out of its comfort zone, but Flash has the potential to open up similar capabilities beyond the advanced development team to standalone designers and, crucially, to the average user (which is why I keep on banging on about the powerpoint to flash converters)
You actually make the case for choice. You are rightly free to not install Flash or, as you’ve done, decide to block it except in the 10% of cases where you think it’s useful (and I’ve argued the case that that figure will rise as Flash moves away from HTML enhancement to self-contained RIAs). You are now arguing for the right of Steve Jobs to block all instances whether useful or not and not just for you but for every Apple user and in so doing to compromise the universality of the web for all producers and consumers.
And I somehow don’t think that Jobs will let you block his iAds

@Alperian – Thankfully it’s not just in Apple’s hands as Google and Android do understand, and live up to, the open principles of the web.

@Grant – Google and Adobe are working to make Flash searchable, but if this is a prime concern do it in HTML. As I say HTML is better for browsing and findability ie bringing in the end user, Flash then lets you deliver value added content and functionality.

@Tom – I still think it is you, not Jobs, putting up the smokescreen here! First lets be clear once again – it is not HTML that competes with Flash, but the entire W3C open standards portfolio. It includes CSS, JavaScript, the supported binary image formats etc.

The real issue here is: is the future a common web standard owned by the community or is it potentially hundreds of incompatible proprietary standards all requiring their own “plugin” (effectively this means a custom browser since the browser in this case is just a thin layer between the custom rendering engine and the platform OS). This is the week point of your argument: if you support the Adobe runtime you are logically compelled to support competitors to it as well (as you have done) – Silverlight already, and Google, Apple and others will also feel compelled to compete in this space if Adobe succeeds.

Suddenly limited mobile devices are supporting tens of different rendering engines all taking resources and adding potential vulnerabilities and instabilities. Jobs is justified in fearing the resultant mess will be blamed on his platform not the real culprits – just ask Microsoft!

I am still not convinced that the W3C runtime cannot, in the foreseeable future, do everything Flash can *as a runtime target*. You make good points about authoring tools – they are better (and more expensive!) for Flash, but there is no reason I can see why these tools, and tools of this quality, should not target the W3C runtime rather than, or as well as, Flash.

Please stop harping on about the different origins of HTML and Flash – this is true but irrelevant. They are converging and W3C has clearly signalled their intent to converge the open platform with Flash capabilities. Maybe they are on a fools errand and will never achieve this, but in that case you ought to be pushing for a separate W3C standard that is more like Flash rather than handing this space over to competing commercial concerns.

If Jobs is sinning it is in not making WebApps first class citizens in the AppStore model. My sense is that it is this pushing magazines and the like onto the iApp model, not the limitations of WebApps.

@John

I assure you that I am very well aware that HTML5 is not the magic bullet that Jobs presents it as and that the reality of the wider open standards portfolio is an incredibly slippery foundation on which to build (and completely dependent on all implementations including Microsoft’s)
You’re right that the future nature of the web is the real issue (well one of them along with choice, anti-competitive practices etc). And it doesn’t matter at all that Flash and Silverlight are competing for the same space – that’s called healthy competition and is the exact opposite of Jobs’ monopolistic approach. More importantly, it doesn’t matter to the end user if content is done in either format because, unlike with browsers, they don’t have to choose between them, but can install both. The suggestion of hundreds of competing formats is way off the mark – as Microsoft has found with Silverlight it’s a massive undertaking to build a cross-platform web platform (though credit to them for trying and competing openly rather than coming up with a spurious reason to ban Flash/Java from Windows).
Moreover, as I’ve said before, the core Flash Player engine is open source, SWF and FLV/F4V are fully documented formats that anyone can use and, crucially, the Flex framework is also open source. I would like Adobe to go further, as they have done with PDF, but Jobs portrayal of Flash as “100% proprietary” is deliberately misleading and absolute rubbish.
The reason I “harped on” about the different origins of HTML and Flash was to try and walk you through explaining why they are so fundamentally different and why, although functionality will increasingly overlap, they are coming from different directions, have different strengths and shouldn’t be expected to be able to do everything that the other one does. I suggest you read the article again to see the reasons that targeting the content-focused, mark-up and page-based multiple-browser runtimes is inherently different from targeting the self-contained, design and development-focused Flash and Silverlight players. CSS doesn’t turn HTML into PostScript on the design front and the new HTML5 APIs don’t turn the browser into a serious development platform for applications.
And as I’ve said before, yes Adobe’s tools are expensive, but using the open source markup-based Flex SDK, developers can produce Flash content for free and there is a thriving open source web community doing just that.
And no the W3C has not signalled its intent to converge the open platform with Flash capabilities. The Flash-killing line comes from and is promoted by Apple and the W3C had actually closed the book on HTML until Apple announced it was going ahead with HTML5 anyway.
Finally Jobs does not include WebApp as first class citizens in the AppStore because they cannot deliver the same first class desktop-style experience as Apple’s proprietary applications (or Flash and Silverlight cross-platform apps) and because the fact that they are openly available via URL (like Flash and Silverlight cross platform apps) means that they are outwith his control.

@Andy – Absolutely.

@fingerbob
It is a numbers game and designers and developers are always going to target a 100% platform whenever they can. If Flash stops being near-universal because Jobs bans it, then it immediately loses its main strength and attraction.

@Tom I am not promoting Jobs’ view of the on-line world. I disagree with a lot of what he says – and I agree, a lot of what he wants is locking revenue to the iTunes Store, not third parties through rich Flash apps; although how that will be different to rich HTML/CSS/JavaScript apps, I don’t know, I suppose Flash is an easy target for him, as it is an add-in, as opposed to what the browser does (I doubt the devices would sell at all, without at least a web browser).

However, I have been against Flash since about 2004, when I first started running a Flash blocker on my desktop; long before Jobs started his bandwagon. The new 10.1 is a big improvement and does seem to be a little lighter on resources than the old versions – although a majority of Flash objects fail to load on my iMac (I think that might be because I have disabled local storage, to stop the misuse of Flash Cookies).

For me, Flash has 4 major obstacles to overcome, before I will take it seriously:

1. Its history of being misused for simple site navigation, which can be implemented in HTML more quickly, easily and in a more user friendly manner than Flash.

2. Its history of abuse by advertisers to hijack the browser, when visiting sites. I have nothing against sites generating revenue from ads, but they should be static jpegs, which don’t take over the whole page, until dismissed. This is a major reason I Flash-Block. I won’t ad-block a site, but if the site is stupid enough to use Flash for adverts, they only have themselves to blame (yes, I’m looking at you PC Pro!).

3. Security – Adobe currently have a quarterly patch cycle, but it seems to be getting almost weekly zero-day exploits (along with Acrobat/Reader). Adobe are slow to react and don’t seem to be taking the weak security of their products seriously – much like Microsoft back at the beginning of the decade.

4. It is too resource hungry. 10.1 on Windows is starting to address this, but it is something they should have looked at nearly a decade ago, instead of continually adding new features, they should debug and optimise what is already there first.

To be honest, I don’t trust JavaScript either, I always surf with a script blocker as well, and only let trusted domains run scripts (and Google-analytics isn’t one of them! ), so it isn’t just Flash, the whole Internet structure is archaic and prone to exploits. The whole damned thing needs a total overhaul, but Flash is an easy target, because it is a bigger offender than the browsers it runs in, and it is easily disabled / removed from systems.

If Adobe can win back my trust, by addressing the performance and security problems effectively and in a timely manner, I might give it another chance.

@David (and John)

I’ve tried to explain why Flash apps will remain different from web apps and the difference between the Web as desktop-style player-based platform and page-bound browser-based media (just have a look at the Buzzword screenshot at the top of the page and imagine trying to do that via JavaScript and CSS!). It’s precisely this difference between what Safari can deliver via open standards and what the proprietary iPhone/iPad applications (or Flash/Silverlight) can deliver that is driving this debate. Jobs is deliberately pretending that HTML5 etc will provide a true application platform rather than just a richer media base to act as the cover he needs to ban Flash/Silverlight/Java and so prevent the open Web living up to its full potential and becoming a real application platform and open rival to the AppStore. I want the web as a medium to be as rich as possible but I also want the web to be as rich and open a platform as possible.
Regarding Flash and its past history and misuse and the questions of security and performance I largely agree although you are certainly carrying over your dislike of ads (and inefficiency) to the underlying carrier which is like blaming HTML for porn.
I also want Flash to be used less and only where it’s the best solution. Moreover to target the new consumer mobile/slate platform the technology certainly has to change. It is doing precisely that and 10.1 as the first OSP-endorsed mobile dedicated player is a huge step in the right direction and shows that Adobe knows what it needs to do.
Ultimately though, any rich web technology is going to use resources and raise questions of security – as you point out with JavaScript. It’s true that this puts a lot of onus on Adobe to get it right. However I would argue that targeting a single, controlled, heavily-developed runtime actually provides a better chance of locking-down security and certainly of boosting performance (as NVIDIA’s Tegra announcement shows). And the idea that Apple can’t get the iPad to efficiently run Flash (the format and engine are open so they can even do their own player if they want to) is ridiculous.
I’m delighted that I seem to have persuaded you that Flash isn’t inherently evil. Who knows maybe it will even prove to be the tight performance-optimised platform you have been looking for all these years!
You are free to give Flash a second chance. But not if you are using an iPhone or iPad because Jobs has deprived you of your choice.

Thanks very much Peter. Not sure about resurrecting the column but I would like to write about this debate in the magazine to try and get more people thinking about what’s really going on here. Hopefully the response, positive and negative, will help convince TPTB that it’s worth covering.

Well, I think flash elements are ok but the whole website just does not make sense. You can d all the same things with html and make it at least google friendly. What is the point of having a website that noone can see? Thanks for the post. David