Last month Flash Player had to be updated because of a nasty bug that allowed evil-minded people to take control of a computer after an Excel spreadsheet with an embedded malicious Flash file had been opened on the system. This is of course not the only time Flash and Adobe have had security problems, so the question is if we really need Flash?
Apple isn’t including any of Adobes products as pre-installed software on their products any more, with the reason that the users should download the latest version directly from Adobes web site if they wish to use it. None of the mobile devices from Apple support Flash at all, not even as an optional download. This could be a political thing, but it shows that Adobe got problems and they need to work on the security in their products.
Also Adobe needs to build up a good reputation because of the up-coming competition from HTML 5 to play video. Previously it wasn’t possible to play video with just HTML, so Flash had a market, but with HTML 5 it’s a different story. As soon as all web browsers have updated to follow the standard HTML 5 you don’t really need Flash any more. So if Flash should have a market Adobe need to do something that’s better than HTML 5. Why would anyone otherwise install and run Flash if they can use HTML 5 without plugins?
Youtube for example can already play video without Flash for iPhones and iPads and I guess that’s because Safari is already updated to support video in HTML 5. This means that everyone with a Mac, or iUnit from Apple don’t need to install Flash to watch Youtube and if Youtube is working without Flash for these units it must work with other web browsers too that support HTML 5.
Some people say that Apple predicted or even started the doom of disk drives when they removed it from Macs and now Flash has been removed from the Macs. What do you think? Will this be the end of Flash?
As a long time Mac user, I’ve mixed feelings about this. I so want HTML 5 to be able to be the de facto open standard but so it seems to be right now just one more thing you have to hope people have upgraded for. Safari is still a very tiny percent of the browser usage out there. Last time I checked there were still issues with Firefox and HTML 5 video. Since decent HTML 5 video support isn’t coming till IE9, and given that there are people still using IE6, Flash isn’t going to be necessary for a long time. Also Flash does many things beyond just video and I don’t see that HTML 5 is able to replace those things right now with current browsers support. Seems like if Adobe wants to get their act together they still have time make Flash remain a strong player.
Does HTML 5 really make things more secure? Aren’t things still be worked out with the standard and doesn’t it matter how well vendors implement it? While I hear about Flash having security issues, it’s never affected me in real life. What does affect me is how SLOW Flash seems to be on a Mac. That may just be an issue of native code? and having a lot more work done on the Windows versions. I’ve heard that Adobe is coming out with hardware acceleration code for the Mac (at least new models). Certainly for advertising such as animated banners on websites, I don’t see HTML 5 providing that anytime soon. Though we may be all on our smart phones and tablets and then banners will be html 5 on Apple products and Flash on Android and Windows7x products!