Flash on mobile devices

Am I the only one that does not want to see Flash on the iPhone or iPod touch ever? Not even as an option.

Adobe seems to have grabbed some corporate mindshare with announcements that Flash 10 will be on Nokia and Palm devices (the Pre specifically). With so many fronts jumping on the Flash 10 bandwagon, this is starting to look like a bit of an avalanche.

I think Flash is bad for developers and in the end bad for consumers. Every implementation drags down the browser hosting the content so I don't expect any different from a new version. Flash has no place on the desktop web, let alone the mobile/hand-held web.

What's wrong with having it as an option ? As an end user at this point I want the browser to support it because there are too many sites that require it.

Because having Flash be bad is the only way to reconcile the Pre having Flash and Bruno's conviction that the Pre has to be the worst device ever.

Ahh I stopped following that thread

Wow, that's a pretty bold statement. Flash single-handedly revolutionized streaming video, not to mention all the little annoying flash games people post here.

Mojo, you're confusing Quicktime with Flash. And Flash's "popularity" for streaming video is owed to its use on YouTube. The implementation (site) pushed the popularity, not the underlying format itself. I'd argue that's better known as the format of choice for the scourge of flashing and blinking advertisements.

Bitt, this has nothing to do with the Pre and everything to do with Flash. It's Adobe's mess now, but the fault is with Macromedia.

Apart from web-based gaming, Flash really has no purpose. That's a pretty extreme comment, but it's the hyper-extension of the blink HTML tag to put it another way. Flash based games may somewhat damage the marketplaces being established by Apple and other vendors as well. I'd also not like to see Adobe get a free pass bypassing Apple's SDK while others may continue to be locked out (no interpreters allowed for anyone else).

There are a lot of important things missing from the iPhone and other mobile operating systems and browsers. Flash isn't one of those things. I'll usually see blog sites like Engadget or Gizmodo cry for Flash because frankly they have to always cry for something. But I've never seen any of them mention any solid reason for needing it - perhaps by mentioning some important sites that absolutely require it. I'd put in a vote to have those sites re-implemented with web standards, of which flash is most certainly not.

Anyway, I'd just rather not see otherwise decent devices polluted by Flash.

The only times I miss Flash on the iPhone are when I hit a website where the web designer hasn't done the due dilligence of making sure their web site still works without Flash.

I have more than once wanted to see a restaurant's menu on the iPhone, and couldn't, for this very reason.

I know, it's the web designer who needs a smack upside the head in this situation. But since I can't usually administer such penalties in person, the only remaining option is to put the darn Flash on the iPhone. As awful as that is.

But won't Advertisers use whatever is widely available. If YouTube had made some other streaming tech a must have, the advertisers would be all over that instead.

Is Flash disliked because it's Flash, or because advertisers use it?

Because of what it lets advertisers do: the popups, the flying things. I have Flash installed in IE on the laptop, just for those rare sites that (a) don't show you the content without Flash and (b) don't have competitors I can do business with instead. And for Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, the one good thing ever done with Flash.

What makers of Flash did which was very clever (in an evil way), was to take advantage of their installed base of Shockwave viewers and their automatic updaters, to push out an unrelated streaming video codec -- which then meant they had the best installed base of a next-generation video format, so YouTube adopted it as their standard.

In a sane world (e.g. Linux) you'd be able to get the FLV video codec without the Shockwave Flash browser plugin, just as you'd be able to get the Quicktime video codec without the Quicktime player or Itunes.

If Flash comes to the Iphone, I hope it comes with a prominent, or failing that at least effective, off-switch.

Peter

And I think your confusing Quicktime with Real. To me, that was the product that showed people streaming audio and video was going to work. And even when practically everyone had Real installed, the W3C sat on it's hands and didn't add media features to the base HTML standards.

Quicktime and Windows Media fought over the market share Real was leaving behind as it died off, but neither became the de-facto standard before Flash streaming took over.

I think the thing about Flash that annoys me the most is how CPU inefficient it is. Sure, it can do streaming video, but it's going to use enough of the processor to start spinning up fans in a modern day laptop. How they will get ti to reasonably run on a modern day mobile phone is a good question. I however wouldn't mind having it if it does give me access to a few more streaming media options as long as it does have an off switch.

Yeah, Flash is crap, but as Tony said, it isn't going anywhere, so supporting it isn't a bad thing. I have little doubt that there will be a way to disable it, and it will be nice to have it to play a million little flash games instead of waiting for freeware games to appear for a brand new operating system.

Not if you don't mind your batteries draining rather rapidly.

Do you also despise Java and Silverlight as browser plug-ins?

Pretty much.



This worries me. There's no way to disable it on the desktop without resorting to third-party tools/plugins/hacks. Or of course uninstalling it.



The App Store already suffers from quantity over quality, I only see Flash-based games making this worse.

Some of these things got a lot better when that patent troll popped up and made it so that you had to click on these embedded objects to activate them. It would have avoided a lot of the ill will surrounding Flash if it had been like that from the beginning.

Peter

What makes you think flash games would be added to the Pre's "app store?" They're already all over the web.

I'm not suggesting they would be going in the Pre or any other app store. On the contrary (in fact I wasn't even thinking of the Pre when I wrote that comment). I'm suggesting that the abundance of disposable Flash-ware will only serve to dilute the interests of consumers in quality software period.

It's general quantity versus quality argument, but not limited to the specific source.

As far as the Pre goes however, Flash seems to be somewhat of a necessity since it's not running an OS where developers can actually create real native applications anyway. Without Flash I think they'd be in a much weaker position in fact.

You might not like JavaScript and you might not like HTML, but the impression I get from what Palm's told us so far is that the Pre will use Javascript as its application language and HTML5 as its display interface. It also strongly implies that there will be Javascript libraries that will be able to access hardware or the OS more-or-less directly.

Your argument is that people complained when Apple said that the iPhone was going to only allow web-based third-party applications. Unless I'm mistaken, their implication was that you got no more interface to the hardware than any normal web browser would. There is a huge difference between those two standpoints.

I quite like them both actually, but for web development. Coupled with PHP on the back end and you have the tools to achieve all manners of web goodness. I'm not really keep on the idea of using those tools as general-purpose application development platforms. In this case something like Flash is going to help a product like the Pre.

I don't like Flash on the web though.



That was a time-buying move by Apple while they worked out the SDK (which was coming all along). But not part of what we're talking about in this thread which is really about Flash in the browser and how I'd like to not see it on the iPhone.