Wow. Big Changes. Bad news and more bad news for Adobe Flash and Flash developers over the past few days.
Apple Says No Flash On Apple Mobile
First, there was the announcement by Steve Jobs on the Apple blog.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
Steve hath spoken. Adobe Flash lies broken.
Microsoft Says Yes To H.264 Video, Says No To Flash
Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the IE team drove in another nail with an announcement on the IE Blog.
The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.
The name of this blog isn’t “Watchable Web” so I don’t know anything about what hidden or not so hidden agendas Apple or Microsoft might have for supporting H.264. But Flash’s funeral will have a big impact on the way text looks on the web, and soon.
Web Fonts Become More Important, Cufón, Too.
@Font-Face just became a whole lot more important. If Flash isn’t going to be available on Apple Mobile devices and IE9 won’t support it for video, Flash no longer has a future. For text replacement, it is no longer a viable option, period. As in: stop using as of now, today. As in: if using, phase out, soon.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
There’s been a lot of creative interpretation of Hachamovitch’s post and what exactly he might have meant by ‘H.264 video only’. He did clarify, however, that IE9 will still accept the Flash plug-in, and by extension, Flash video. Silverlight too, one imagines
When he says ‘H.264 video only’, he means native support – all the plug-in based stuff remains.
You’re quite right. The subsequent post on the IE blog was quite clear that the Flash plug-in will still be available. But defaults count. Why fuss with a plug-in that may or may not be installed when there is built in support for another codec? It has to have a negative effect. Flash will be that much more unattractive going forward.
But the real killer is Apple. The iPhone and, by the looks of it, the iPad are already too popular to ignore the lack of Flash.
I think it boils down to a simple thing: it won’t be much longer that browser add-ons like Flash or Silverlight will provide much value over and above what can be done with CSS3 and HTML5 and JavaScript. I’m no blind admirer of Jobs, but I do agree with his assessment and even his goal of a web that’s as open and free of proprietary encumbrances as possible.
full disclosure: Yes, I make my living as a Flash programmer and I have for a long time. I also switched to OS X several years ago after two decades on Windows.
Every three years or so, Flash is supposed to die. First it was DHTML. Then AJAX. Now HTML5. Still waiting.
Adobe could send everyone on vacation and not spend another nickel or minute on the Flash Player or dev tools, and it would still be three or four years before the rest of the industry caught up. It’s not that it can’t/won’t happen, it’s not that Flash is the ideal way to do things. But it ain’t going away for a very, very long time. And it might surprise people how much they’ll miss it if (a BIG if) it’s gone. Hell, a respectable percentage of iPhone/iPad owners already *do*.
As Android + Flash Player 10.1 devices start appearing in the wild, these conversations are going to get infinitely more interesting. We’ll get to see how many of Jobs’ manifesto bullets are legit and how many are FUD.
PS, have you ever actually tried to generate EOT fonts for IE?! 1) It’s a workflow nightmare. 2) Windows text-antialiasing is horrid. 3) Kerning? Ligatures? Huh? 4) Oh yeah, EOT isn’t an open standard. That’s just the tip of the *font* iceberg. Audio, video, client-side DB, etc could each fill a book.
@jon
>Every three years or so, Flash is supposed to die.
I was skeptical too. And hesitated to report anything about it until Jobs made that statement.
But the iPhone’s been around for quite awhile now and still no Flash. Apple seems adamant and I’m taking Jobs at his word.
Nothing lasts forever. The technological landscape of the past twenty years is littered with skill-sets acquired at great personal cost and then, reluctantly abandoned.
Everybody over the age of 19 has a little list of those.
>have you ever actually tried to generate EOT fonts for IE?
You’re kidding me right?
EOTFAST: A New And Essential Product For @Font-Face Web Fonts
EOTFAST
Download the package and then come back if you’re still having problems.
There are also some font processing scripts – haven’t checked them out yet – written by Garrick Van Buren of the free font services site Kernest.com that are a part of Kernest’s newly open sourced font serving engine, Fontue.
Jon Williams, thanks for making these points. About me — I have a computer science degree and was always interested in graphics, 3d, vision etc. After spending numerous years doing “not-fun” software development in C/C++/Java…, I’ve finally decided to branch off on my own and do more “visual” programming as a consultant. I have a wide array of OOP and scripting languages under my belt, so I know I can pick up anything. The problem is, even though I talked myself into buying a mountain of Adobe’s Flash/Flex/Actionscript/etc books and trial software … I feel innately unmotivated to learn this proprietary stuff, but I continue to struggle to will myself to do so only because (1) it’s the industry standard if I wish to appeal to most potential clients, and (2) business success sometimes (or often) rewards the most popular products in their class, not the best-in-class.
Coming from a formal computer science background that values good software design principles, I would much rather continue programming in Qt or another open-source OOP framework/language — you know, stuff that has some academic credibility and that I believe has a future.
Anyway, Jon’s comment that it will be another couple of years before (if/when) Flash gets phased out provides slightly more incentive to just bite the bullet, learn it, and put it on my resume.
@zola
There are an awful lot of Flash developers out there. A huge number. And there are circumstances where there are *only* desktop browsers to contend with, not mobile, and on intranets there is often only one approved browser, as well. Under those circumstances, Flash might make a lot of sense for some time to come.
But if mobile IS a consideration, and iPhone and iPad users count to you, considering Flash for a new project seems a little nuts.