Thanks guys!

All of those reasons are more of a euphemism for the conflict of interest. Apple is meticulous about user experience. They build their own hardware and software. They even control the details of their developer eco-system. If you’re iPhone app doesn’t adhere to their HIG (human interface guidelines) it’s going to get rejected. In one way or another apple controls and manages every single possible aspect of the platform very meticulously.

So.. if flash were to work on the web browser.. well now you see the control is lost. You could make flash applications or games that run in the web browser. Apple doesn’t want that and Adobe knows this.

So for better or for worse I can say you could be pretty darn certain iPad like iPhone will not use flash. Which is why I think YouTube and Vimeo’s recent update to serving html5 video via h.264 is no coincidence!

The only people who are complaining or up in air about lack of flash are the folks who develop or design on that platform. NOT the iPhone’s customer base. Its unlikely these mechanics will change.

This is why you see Adobe going out of their way in an attempt to convert Flash into a development IDE for the iPhone. So instead of exporting flash movies Flash CS5 is expected to actually compile flash projects into iPhone apps that could be sold on the store for the iPhone or iPod. We’ll have to see they go with that!

As for advertisers.. until they wake up and smell the coffee a lot of folks using iPhones or in the future iPads are getting a ‘free ride’ on a lot of these web sites. It’s nice not to have the annoying rich media ads loading let alone fly out, expand, or some other obnoxious novelty effect.

I can only offer two datapoints personally, but the only hard reset my 2 month old Macbook has needed so far was triggered by a Flash game (vvvvvv) running in Firefox 3.5. On my previous Macbook (c.2007) I regularly disabled Flash to silence the laptop’s fan, which came on whenever there was a Flash object on the page.

I think it depends on the venue, and on identity… last week I checked through the past year’s worth of feeds.adobe.com, and the only hits on “crash” were incidental ones. These folks use Flash all day, under stress, and are perhaps 50% Mac. Not an issue for them. I’d agree with you, though, that pseudonymous comments at Apple fansites have a startling frequency rate.

I’m planning a blogpost reprising simple diagnostic steps for browser instability, at blogs.adobe.com/jd, but it looks like it won’t be until next week until I get some writing time. Should be easily tractable though.

jd/adobe

With H.264 video natively supported in the browser (with good performance) the need for Flash to view video is greatly reduced if not eliminated.

Check out this article by John Gruber for an excellent assessment on why Flash is not likely to appear on the iPad: http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash

Personally I’d love to see it kept off of the device. The better the iPad sells without having support for Flash, the more open standards (canvas, SVG, HTML5) will be embraced.

The ‘signal’ posts are terrific. This is a valuable service you are providing.

Thanks for the post!