Over at the Firefox Nightly builds site, Mozilla have released Firefox for Android with 'experimental support' for Flash. After Adobe publicly killed off mobile Flash earlier this month, this turned up as quite a surprise. I've installed it on my Android phone and I must say, it's actually quite good. It's not quick, and it sometimes judders a little as Flash on a mobile always has been, but that's a given really. I suspect that my phone was partly to blame here as well.
Even though this isn't sold as a stable release, I didn't experience any problems with Flash or the browser itself. I would even say that in a way, I preferred it to the standard Chrome install on my phone.
Could it be that mobile Flash will eventually be spun off into an open source project for the wider Internet community to take hold of? Only time will tell, but don't expect to see the final version until early next year.
Showing posts with label Flash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flash. Show all posts
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Mobile Flash is Officially Dead
Now that Adobe has publicly killed off Flash for mobile devices, what are the wider implications for the rest of the development community? Well, hopefully it will be a brighter future thanks to the emphasis on HTML5 that the company seems to be placing all of its eggs.
It's certainly been a long time coming, and to be perfectly honest I'm not surprised at all. There are many reasons, just take your pick as to which is your favourite. The big two are cost and the lack of cross-platform access which Apple unfortunately has had its way with. There are very few companies now that develop sites in Flash as it is far more costly, harder to work with and lacks many of the standard accessibility features that most browsers apply to standard HTML websites. The cross-platform thing has certainly hasn't done Adobe any favours, but to be fair I don't think Adobe have done themselves any favours either.
I forever hate updating my machine whenever a minor point release of Flash is released, which at the moment seems to be every week as soon as Windows starts. Really, is that absolutely necessary? I'm sure it isn't. Then one point that I do agree with Apple on, is that it is a battery killer because it is very CPU intensive. Even though on the PC Adobe have now shifted some of this load to the GPU, it wasn't enough. It also took them forever to release a 64 bit version of Flash, which is something that I've never understood. For a company as big as Adobe, it's a huge let down. Is the desktop going to be the next one to fall? Apple no longer include Flash as part of their standard OS installs (again, no surprise there), so it's a sincere possibility.
The good news is that is seems to be a victory for web standards and compliancy and it's something that I almost always do my best to conform to. While mobile Flash won't be going anywhere soon, it certainly is an admission of defeat for Adobe. Even Microsoft haven't included Flash in its latest mobile operating system so it was probably best that Adobe gave up sooner rather than later.
Personally I've never really liked Flash. It has always been difficult to develop and so I always skated around the subject when it came up, but now, it's a sign of relief that I know to put my eggs in the HTML 5 basket.
It's certainly been a long time coming, and to be perfectly honest I'm not surprised at all. There are many reasons, just take your pick as to which is your favourite. The big two are cost and the lack of cross-platform access which Apple unfortunately has had its way with. There are very few companies now that develop sites in Flash as it is far more costly, harder to work with and lacks many of the standard accessibility features that most browsers apply to standard HTML websites. The cross-platform thing has certainly hasn't done Adobe any favours, but to be fair I don't think Adobe have done themselves any favours either.
I forever hate updating my machine whenever a minor point release of Flash is released, which at the moment seems to be every week as soon as Windows starts. Really, is that absolutely necessary? I'm sure it isn't. Then one point that I do agree with Apple on, is that it is a battery killer because it is very CPU intensive. Even though on the PC Adobe have now shifted some of this load to the GPU, it wasn't enough. It also took them forever to release a 64 bit version of Flash, which is something that I've never understood. For a company as big as Adobe, it's a huge let down. Is the desktop going to be the next one to fall? Apple no longer include Flash as part of their standard OS installs (again, no surprise there), so it's a sincere possibility.
The good news is that is seems to be a victory for web standards and compliancy and it's something that I almost always do my best to conform to. While mobile Flash won't be going anywhere soon, it certainly is an admission of defeat for Adobe. Even Microsoft haven't included Flash in its latest mobile operating system so it was probably best that Adobe gave up sooner rather than later.
Personally I've never really liked Flash. It has always been difficult to develop and so I always skated around the subject when it came up, but now, it's a sign of relief that I know to put my eggs in the HTML 5 basket.
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