Adobe’s Flash, a multimedia plug-in for browsers, has become the flash point—sorry—for the future of video and interactivity on the Web. Apple doesn’t include a version of Flash in the Mobile Safari browser that’s part of the iPhone OS, and doesn’t allow third-party plug-ins for that browser.
Of course, no other handheld operating system platform offers Flash, either, but leave it to Adobe to whip up foment against Apple as a way of getting users to complain to the iPhone maker.
Apple doesn’t talk much about Flash in public, but in private, Apple head Steve Jobs has reportedly said Flash will never be included on mobile devices because it crashes desktop browsers, is a resource hog, and drains batteries.
Flash is a very clever little hunk of code. It can wrap a custom player around video, which is how Hulu inserts ads into movies and TV shows that you can’t skip over. A standard browser video player provides full scrolling control.
Flash may be best known for video, which represents a vast amount of its usage in terms of people, hours, and content, but it also handles rich interactivity, letting companies develop games and other systems that work wherever Flash runs. It’s also used for stupid intros to Web sites, and some restaurant Web developers rely on Flash, rendering menus and other information nearly unusable.
Adobe has engineered the plug in to work in many different browsers, and develops the software for Windows, Mac OS X, and several Linux flavors. Write a Flash application or create video in a Flash player wrapper, and you distribute it within a Web page. Quite simple.
As I noted, no existing mobile OS includes Flash. But Apple gets the hate because it’s still got the hot platform—iPhone and iPod touch—with the iPad joining them on April 3. The Mobile Safari browser is so good that people want it to do more than it does; Flash is so prevalent that Safari reveals all the places it can’t show content.
At the iPad introduction, it seemed like Steve Jobs went out of his way to show Web sites that had a blue Lego-like building piece that represents a plug-in that can’t be used.
In the nearly three years since the iPhone shipped, and with tens of millions of iPhones and iPod touches in use worldwide, most Web sites have made accommodations. Smart coding can determine whether a browser supports Flash or not, and feed out alternate content.
Some popular sites that rely on Flash have released iPhone apps that replicate or extend the functionality of the Web site. Adobe will also release a tool that lets Flash developers convert their projects into full iPhone apps, and release them through the normal App Store approval process.
The furor seems to be about whether Apple is doing a disservice to users by controlling the browser experience. Apple doesn’t allow competing browsers as such: Developers can create a wrapper around Apple’s technology, but they can’t offer browsers built from scratch, because Apple forbids other browsers from handling JavaScript code, which is the foundation of modern Web sites and a requirement for Web applications.
There’s an alternative to Flash for video: the new HTML5 specification, a revision to the formatting and parameter codes used to describe how a Web page should be displayed. YouTube (among other sites) is already experimenting with feeding video out using the HTML5 format.
So what’s really missing? Well, there are plenty of Flash sites—perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions—that use Flash for light levels of interactivity, stuff that could be done with HTML and JavaScript. That includes dropdown menus, where you hover over a menu and additional choices appear.
A reasonably large number of site—more like tens of thousands—host games and other interactive Flash presentations that can’t be easily translated into another medium.
That’s where it really hurts: Those folks are locked out of mobile platforms unless they create new applications designed for each OS, which requires big bucks if you want to develop for Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone, not to mention Windows Mobile/Windows Phone 7, Nokia’s Symbian (the most heavily used smartphone OS outside the U.S.), and Palm.
In terms of pure hours consumed, Hulu remains the biggest Flash-locked site. As noted earlier, Hulu wants to control the experience and advertise at you in exchange for free viewing. That’s incompatible with feeding raw video to a browser, but Hulu is rumored to be working on an iPhone app that will let them fully control the vertical and the horizontal.
What’s mystifying about all the discussion to me is that Adobe makes tools to create content, and Flash is one of the more convenient ways to make content that works everywhere. But the company isn’t stupid. I expect we’ll see in the near future ways for all its various creative applications to produce the right code for the right place.
