Touché, Apple.

Haha, well said!

One more of this gleeful flash basher posts.

Maybe in one year or in two, when apple has gained world domination, you have to explain your clients that the standard-conform site you made for them doesn’t work at all for people who use the very latest browsing software on the very latest browsing devices, because apple has replaced all standards with their own specifications and there is nothing you can do about it.

Better boycott now.

@dirk I fail to see how your proposed scenario could come to pass when Apple’s “specifications” are universal web standards.

@Dirk: “But would you hand over web-standards to the benevolence of one company?”

That’s not what Apple or any of the so called “Flash bashers” (ooh-err, that sounds dirty!) are trying to say, as well you know. As a matter of fact, that’s almost precisely what you and the “Flash lovers” are actually suggesting! Apple support the *open* HTML5 standard, along with the *open* CSS3 standard. As well as the *open* JavaScript and the myriad different frameworks. Apple do not control *any* of these. They, along with Google, Mozilla and Microsoft to name some of the companies involved with the HTML 5 working group. In fact, HTML 5 is actually how Apple originally intended third party apps to be written for the iPhone OS platform! Apple has simply chosen not to support a closed, non-standard, proprietary system that has been proven time and time again to not work particularly well with their (or other developers) platforms. It’s hardly surprising, is it?

If you made sites using Flash, pretty soon you’d be explaining to a client why the site you made for them doesn’t work at all for people who use the very latest browsing software on the very latest browsing devices.

No, and this is a false comparison: your site *can* look and function the same - or at least to an acceptable degree - in IE.
It seems to me that you’re letting your dislike of Flash obscure the point that Apple is breaking the web. I didn’t like it when it when Microsoft did it through incompetence; I don’t like it done by design either.

At those who don’t like Apple creating locked down platforms - just don’t buy one of those products - they’re not forcing you at knifepoint to remove Flash from your computer. If you want it, you run it.

So far they’ve not removed it from desktop Safari, and I’d imagine that’d be unlikely (especially retrospectively anyway), so even if you are a die-hard Mac user with a insatiable passion for vector plugins, I really don’t see why you need to worry. There are so many things you don’t have direct control over on the web anyway, you should be used to goalposts moving - it’s the very nature of an innovative, evolving medium.

All the major browsers are to some extent now on board and with progressing with HTML5; and old, proprietary and sometimes buggy Flash (as we know it) will suffer as a consequence.

Well, I don’t run it on my desktop anymore anyway. Not missed it yet and everything is so quick!

@Andy The main reason they don’t support flash on their iphone/ipad is because of the “unlimited memory” it uses. Adobe doesn’t limit this in any kind, so rather no flash support on an iphone (which I haven’‘t missed a second, most flash are ads). Imagine that iphones supported flash, and crash when visiting memory absorbing flash websites, in the end, apple would still be the bad guy…

@Denis Walker

The point is that the web is broken by Flash, not Apple.  There have always been people without Flash installed, whether it’s because of the accessibility issues it raises, that they’re in an environment where they can’t install it (not just i[Phone|Pad]s, but at work or on less common operating systems that don’t have support) or simply on principle.

Again, no. Flash does not break the web for the reasons you give any more than using CSS3 or JavaScript does: if you have it enabled, great: you get all the toys. If not, fine: the site degrades incrementally according to the platforms’ capabilities. No CSS3? No text-stroke, no loss. No JavaScript? No problem: the page reloads rather than making AJAX calls. No images? Bonzer: just read the alt tag content or get JAWS to do it for you. No Flash? Hey ho… the content is rendered in HTML anyway, rinse and repeat.

So what happens when the primary functionality cannot be reproduced *but* by the use of [insert technology of choice, open, closed, Schroedingerian, whatever]... what then? There are many things I want to be able to offer users that HTML5 + JavaScript are simply incapable of.

Bottom line: I think it is disingenuous to frame the argument in terms of Flash vs web standards. Apple - and it pains me to say this as a fully-fledged fanboi - is trying to define and control every aspect of the platform and is happy to throw some of the most interesting work on the web under the bus in order to do so. They can’t own or control web standards, but they *are* making a power-grab on what consitutes web *content*.

My lucky stars remain unthanked.

@Joggink

The main reason they don’t support flash on their iphone/ipad is because of the “unlimited memory” it uses. Adobe doesn’t limit this in any kind [...]

Not true in the upcoming 10.1 release. Not that this will make any difference to Apple.

Imagine that iphones supported flash, and crash when visiting memory absorbing flash websites, in the end, apple would still be the bad guy…

I have yet to see a single commentator on either side of the debate ever blame Apple for the performance of the Flash plugin. The single exception to this is hardware acceleration, where the Adobe devs have explained that Apple does not provide API methods for decoding. In every other case it’s Flash that gets the bad rap.

@Joggink, you compare one closed platform with loads of others (Nokia, Samsung etc), hardly a fair argument. What you want is an open platform like Android. Of course, Android also doesn’t support Flash at the moment, but the crucial difference is that Android is not purposefully stopping Flash being on there - it will be eventually. And eventually there will be Android tablets and people will have the choice of what they want to use.

Funny. I didn’t intend this as a Flash vs standards death-match, nor an anti-Adobe, pro-Apple love-in.

Odd… I can’t see how a post telling me to “thank my lucky stars” that I can’t develop anything in Flash and have it render on the most important emerging platform there is could be construed as anything else.

What I am genuinely interested in (but didn’t explicitly ask for) is how (if you’re a Flash producer) you might go about explaining the lack of ‘anything’ visible to your clients who may not care about the wider debate nor understand the issues?

You think there *is* an explanation that would go over well with that breed of client? No… what’ll happen is that I’ll build what they want as far as web standards + jQuery/Raphael/Whatever will allow, and if they ask why they can’t have feature X I’ll explain knowing full well that in the back of their mind it’s an issue of my competence as a developer. Good times.