Does Flash Need Saving? Nahh…
Flash isn’t on the iPhone. It isn’t on the iPad, either. And for this, everyone is losing their minds.
Flash haters are coming out of the woodwork proclaiming the death of Flash, eager to feast on the dead flesh of another technological casualty while they bow in fealty to their white shiny god (Apple, dummy! :). Silverlight lovers, usually so vocal against Flash, are conspicuously absent from the debate.
But I think it’s a little premature to announce the demise of Flash. As my estimable colleague Derrick Grigg pointed out, there are so many things that Flash can do that are specialized and unique that no other web technology can do well.
As to the criticisms of the Flash Player: it crashes on OSX, it’s unstable, it’s insecure, it’s a resource hog. All potentially true, on the surface. But like a fixed TV debate subject to concision, 140-character tweets and troll rebuttals cannot give the whole story.
Flash does not work as well as it can on OSX because Apple and Adobe aren’t working well together, for whatever reason. Whether it’s Adobe being lazy in not utilizing Carbon in innovative ways, or Apple will not cooperate with Adobe in helping them develop better integration, I don’t particularly care who’s at fault. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to improve anytime soon. It looks like the two have declared war on that issue.
Runtimes like the Flash Player are more akin to browsers than the language which runs in them. So comparing HTML5 to the Flash Player is like comparing apples and oranges. It would be a more equal comparison if the Flash Player runtime were compared to Firefox, or Chrome, in that the Flash Player is the engine that renders [a SWF file containing] the language. Saying that HTML5 is better than Flash is like saying Javascript is better than Firefox. Huh? Say what?
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