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RIP Adobe Flash (1996-2011) – now let’s bury the dead

This content is 12 years old and may not reflect reality today nor the author’s current opinion. Please keep its age in mind as you read it.

Adobe kills mobile Flash, giving Steve Jobs the last laugh, reports The Guardian’s Charles Arthur following the late Steve Jobs’ epic Thoughts on Flash rant 18 months ago. It’s been about 2.5 years since I too got sick of Flash bringing my powerful Mac to its knees, so I went after the underlying lie that perpetuates the problem, explaining why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%. I even made progress Towards a Flash free YouTube killer, only it ended up being YouTube themselves who eventually started testing a YouTube HTML5 Video Player (while you’re there please do your bit for the open web by clicking “Join the HTML5 Trial” at the bottom of that page).

You see, armed with this heavily manipulated statistic, armies of developers are to this day fraudulently duping their paying clients into deploying a platform that will invariably turn away a percentage of their business at the door, in favour of annoying flaming logos and other atrocities that blight the web:

How much business can you tolerate losing? If you’ve got 95% penetration then you’re turning away 1 in 20 customers. At 90% you’re turning away 1 in 10. At 50% half of your customers won’t even get to see your product. I don’t know too many businesses who can afford to turn away any customers in this economic climate.

In my opinion the only place Flash technology has in today’s cloud computing environment is as a component of the AIR runtime for building (sub-par) cross-platform applications, and even then I’d argue that they should be using HTML5. As an Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection customer I’m very happy to see them dropping support for this legacy technology to focus on generating interactive HTML5 applications, and look forward to a similar announcement for desktop versions of the Flash player in the not too distant future.In any case, with the overwhelming majority of devices being mobile today and with more and more of them including browser functionality, the days of Flash were numbered even before Adobe put the mobile version out of its misery. Let’s not drag this out any longer than we have to, and bury the dead by uninstalling Flash Player. Here’s instructions for Mac OS X and Windows, and if you’re not ready to take the plunge into an open standards based HTML5 future then at least install FlashBlock for Chrome or Firefox (surely you’re not still using IE?).

Update: Flash for TV is dead too, as if killing off mobile wasn’t enough: Adobe Scrapping Flash for TV, Too‎

Update: Rich Internet Application (RIA) architectures in general are in a lot of trouble — Microsoft are killing off Silverlight as well: Mm, Silverlight, what’s that smell? Yes, it’s death

Update: In a surprising move that will no doubt be reversed, RIM announced it would continue developing Flash on the PlayBook (despite almost certainly lacking the ability to do so): RIM vows to keep developing Flash for BlackBerry PlayBook – no joke