Gruber Makes His Case Against Flash on the Tablet, iPhone
LIKE
TWEET
SHARE
PIN
SHARE
POST
MAIL
MORE
Posted January 25, 2010 at 12:36pm by iClarified
John Gruber from Daring Fireball has published an article providing reasons why Flash should not be on the Tablet or iPhone.
In my Tablet Musings piece two weeks ago, I speculated that Apples imminent tablet probably wont support Flash, for all the same reasons the iPhone doesnt. Reaction to this was polarized typically either duh, of course it wont or no way, it has to support Flash. You can see both reactions represented in the thread on my piece at Hacker News. One group is going to be very surprised come Wednesday.
In his report, Gruber addresses Flash and Mac OS X Application Crashes, The Proprietary Web, and Flash Performance on Mac OS X. If you are a strong supporter of Flash and wonder why so many developers dislike it, this is a good article.
I love that Google is making everything open source and them putting HTML5 out there is the best thing to happen in a while. Now you wont have to worry about plug-ins and wait time.
So it comes another iPhone and here we go again, no flash, well at least it sEems to be that way and so ppl will just get tired of a device that will start to show aging on it's third generation and that for sure will make ppl abandon the iPhone, personally i have grown tired of all the fight (jb and such) to get this to work, Maemo may be my next phone, we'll c.
my friend has the n900 and i can tell you this. i'll stick with the annoying jailbreaking iphone lol. even my friend who is dirt cheap about phones and knows nothing about phones like the iphone more. but it's all user preference so give it a try before you buy it.
Wow, that was a pretty convincing article. He makes a very good case for why Apple won't implement (or allow) Flash on the iPhone, and why from Apple's perspective they shouldn't.
From *my* perspective, I still want it. It could make the difference from being anywhere and being able to get the Flash content, versus having to get to my computer and get online.
Battery life: not a factor. Battery life isn't affected when Flash isn't in use.
Advertisements: not a factor. Animated ads won't show when Flash is turned off.
Performance/stability: Currently, Flash doesn't work at all, so any implementation would inherently be better than it is now.
Like it or not, there are many sites that damn foolishly implement Flash for things with no alternatives. I've seen this for ticket sales, schedules, seating, and even the idiots who make Flash only navigation for their whole site.
Now while some people may stick with the iPhone regardless of not being able to get the full internet, many people will see this as, "well, the iPhone doesn't really work 100% of the time".
It may be in Apple's interest to ignore that, and hope that people wise up and drop Flash only implementations, but in the meantime, it can suck for some of us caught between Apple and foolish content creators.