Flash Gordon – Do I Care About Flash?

Seems like the hot topic around the old intertubes is about Adobe Flash, and the iPad’s lack of it. The people at Adobe aren’t thrilled with it, as evidenced by this post on their blog, which up until recently, had a little bit of porno to back up their claim. Daring Fireball has been talking about Flash and why we don’t need it for over a week, and even Steve himself brought it up recently in a fireside chat. Let’s take a minute to talk about Flash and why it’s so important.

When I bought my iPhone, I did a lot of surfing on the web. There were a few different sites that didn’t quite work the way I wanted to, but anytime I had a problem, it was all Flash related. Missing links, ads, etc. I wouldn’t say that I “missed” those things, but regardless, this little part of the web was missing, like someone took out a piece of the puzzle. But over time, I got used to it. I learned to just accept the Lego bricks where I saw them, and moved on with life. I didn’t do enough browsing on the iPhone to make it a big deal, so why stress?

With the iPad, that may change things a bit. I originally thought that without Flash, there was no way that the iPad could succeed. All those Flash games can’t be played on the iPad, making the mobile web experience less like a missing piece in a puzzle, and more like a missing beef patty in a hamburger.

But then, there’s this little bit from that article at Wired:

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.