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As uneasy as I am about what the iPad might say about the future of personal computing, if it can deliver the death blow to Adobe Flash then I'm all for it. Ho

by Niten 17y ago

As uneasy as I am about what the iPad might say about the future of personal computing, if it can deliver the death blow to Adobe Flash then I'm all for it. However, I do have my doubts. This article compares the iPad's Flash problems to Firefox's early problems with sites that were designed specifically for IE, but that's really an apples-to-oranges (Apples to Orange Foxes?) comparison. Firefox succeeded despite early incompatibilities because it targeted power users--the kinds of folks who can live with recurrent web browsing glitches, who can recognize broken sites and don't mind alt-tabbing back to IE where necessary. But the iPad's target demographic isn't the power user, it's the technological neophyte. iPad users may be less tolerant of things not "just working", and the iPad may therefore have a harder time of bridging that incompatibility gap than Firefox did. (And while Firefox users always had the option to fall back to IE--using Firefox and using IE were not mutually exclusive choices--what's the fallback option for iPad users when the content they want is only available with Flash? Carry a laptop with them, too?)

wtallis 17y ago
The lack of a fallback does seem to be the biggest issue. On the iPhone, it doesn't really matter, since none of the flash-based UIs would be usable on it anyways, so a separate version would still need to be developed. The iPad can afford somewhat PC-like interaction, so sites like Hulu could work if there was a flash plugin. What reassures me that Flash is on it's way down is the way web technologies have advanced and been adopted despite IE's dominance and Microsoft's reluctance to properly implement CSS and other newer web features. When Firefox hit the scene, IE was far more dominant than Flash is now, and yet it managed to fight its way into the mainstream. Web sites are now written to follow the standards everywhere that it's convenient, and CSS and JS hacks are used to make it work in IE. Sure, iPad users won't be as forgiving of broken sites as Firefox early adopters were, but their collective voice will be far more influential than the small band of rebels that broke the IE monopoly.

by Niten 17y ago

wtallis 17y ago

The lack of a fallback does seem to be the biggest issue. On the iPhone, it doesn't really matter, since none of the flash-based UIs would be usable on it anyways, so a separate version would still need to be developed. The iPad can afford somewhat PC-like interaction, so sites like Hulu could work if there was a flash plugin. What reassures me that Flash is on it's way down is the way web technologies have advanced and been adopted despite IE's dominance and Microsoft's reluctance to properly implement CSS and other newer web features. When Firefox hit the scene, IE was far more dominant than Flash is now, and yet it managed to fight its way into the mainstream. Web sites are now written to follow the standards everywhere that it's convenient, and CSS and JS hacks are used to make it work in IE. Sure, iPad users won't be as forgiving of broken sites as Firefox early adopters were, but their collective voice will be far more influential than the small band of rebels that broke the IE monopoly.