★ My Hope for Adobe Flash…

It sucks being an Apple consumer right now. It really does. Apple clearly hates Adobe Flash, publicly and privately acknowledges that Flash was the leading cause of OSX Leopard Application and system crashes and they even modified Safari to not crash when Flash decided to fail which is a sign that they are having to do workarounds because Adobe Flash simply sucks on OSX. It’s clear that Apple has abandoned Flash entirely because many of us thought it was performance and battery issues that kept Flash from appearing on the iPhone OS devices. Now, with the release of iPad, it’s obvious that Apple won’t be adopting the standard on mobile devices.

Prior to the iPad announcement I was angry at Apple for their lack of support for Flash and I wasn’t alone. Hell, YouTube was forced in 2007 to create a mobile site for smartphones that played video in H.264 because many handsets didn’t support flash. Apple even worked with YouTube to deliver a custom application for iPhone prior to its June 2007 launch and, once again, the videos play in h.264, not flash. There are still times when browsing the YouTube app for iPhone that I get errors about a video not being available for my mobile device because there’s no h.264 version available.

However, last month (before the iPad came out), YouTube flipped the switch on HTML5 video. Prior to this new video standard, we were stuck with Flash. It was the default technology behind slideshows, games, video and even banner ads. Much of what we enjoyed about today’s web was powered by a system that was closed, non open-source and owned by one company (sound familiar to Apple but let me continue). Apple’s closed systems continue to improve but Flash on the Mac has been broken for years and Adobe won’t push the technology forward. On a PC, flash requires very little system resources which equals battery savings for mobile devices. On the Mac, playing Hulu video on my MacBook cuts the battery life in half, maxes out my CPU and forces the internal fan to come on to combat the heat needed to play a simple standard def video.

Silverlight came to popularity in 2008 and it may be a better way to get video, it’s not native on the Mac and aside from partners such as CBS, Silverlight never really broke through. The reason.. Google & Apple didn’t go with it. Apple didn’t start preinstalling Silverlight on its computers and Google didn’t support it on their video properties. Flash remained king.

For the next two years, the consumer will suffer but I have hope because it’s for the best. See, Google’s switch to HTML5 video on YouTube and Apple’s unwillingness to support Flash on its iPhone OS devices will force web developers to reconsider what system they use to deliver multimedia to users. In a few months, the amount of web devices that don’t have Flash and will never have Flash will surpass 100 million (that’s just Apple devices) and that’s a huge number of 3G & Wi-Fi connected users that will be unable to enjoy content.

In 6 months, it will be clear that there are 100 million potential users who aren’t getting your content and most of the top 5 video sites on the web will be using HTML5 instead of Flash (crossing my fingers that Hulu jumps on board as well).What does this mean?

It means three things.

1. Content creators will be forced to adopt HTML5 for content (video, interactive media)

2. Adobe will have to improve their product or Flash is dead

3. Internet Explorer 6 will finally die.

Right now, YouTube will display HTML5 video only to users of modern browsers (Safari, Firefox & Chrome). IE users are left in the dust but YouTube kindly shows Flash video to those users because it’s a pretty big chunk of people that still visit YouTube with the archaic browser. Soon, more sites will start ditching Flash and going strictly HTML5 and for once, our iPhones and iPads will show us videos and content across the web while Internet Explorer users will see a glaring “missing plugin” icon that we have grown so accustomed to. They will feel our pain.

This process will be slow. It will be painful to us early adopters. Eventually, our notebooks will have longer battery lives, our phones and mobile devices will crash less and have lower CPU utilization and Microsoft + Adobe will have to improve or die. I know Adobe and Microsoft have other revenue streams but I look forward to the day that Google & Apple lead the pack and we, the consumer will benefit.

The only problem, this won’t be a quick transition and for now, you’ll have this to look forward to when you are browsing the web with your iPad or iPhone. (photo credit)

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