Adobe Pulls the Plug on Flash
With rumors swirling, Adobe officially pulled the plug on Flash for the mobile Web Tuesday. In the real world, that left Flash developers struggling to figure out what to do next while Adobe partner Research in Motion scrambled to reassure its ecosystem that the Flash show would go on because, you know, there’s at least a couple of hundred BlackBerry PlayBook owners out there who were getting nervous.
In the Twitterverse, where all things are possible, Steve Jobs was reported to be chortling from beyond the grave—an image that is probably better left unrealized, even on HTML5.
“Hug a Flash developer today,” tweeted Anthony de Rosa, when the hammer came down. We scoured Twitter for tweets about the demise of Flash, and to be honest, that may have been the only non-example of schadenfreude that we found.
You people really hate Flash!
But it’s not likely Adobe didn’t kill the beast graciously. Here’s what the company had to say about HTML5:
"[It] is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively, [making it] the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms."
The switch, Adobe said, "will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video."
And it’s not like Adobe hasn’t been steering developers towards this day for a while. As PCMag lead software analyst Michael Muchmore points out, “Adobe has been making a push for HTML5 development tools, highlighting its new tools' ability to target sites to multiple mobile devices.” The upcoming Adobe Edge tool, he writes, “is basically a Flash-building tool that outputs HTML5 rather than actual Flash.”
All well and good, but HTML5 isn’t going to spring fully formed from Flash’s grave, Muchmore warns: “I'm thrilled about the non-proprietary future of HTML5, but it will take time before the hundreds of billions of sites already out there have updated to HTML5.”
Wise words but not ones you’re likely to find on Twitter. So let’s throw caution to the wind and break out the Tweets.
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By: Damon Poeter
