What is Adobe Flash?
The internet provides many facets of multimedia. Adobe Flash is one application that streams movies, music and interactive media. The technology was created by Macromedia for developers and designers, but was later bought by Adobe.
Why did Adobe Flash Player “Die”?
One of the largest contributions to Flash Players death is the Apple controversy. When the iPhone was released, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs made the decision to not support Flash on the iPhone. This decision,followed by the sudden popularity of the iPhone, urged the tech world to produce web content compatible that would not require Flash Player. It wasn’t a sudden switch though, YouTube playback wasn’t supported on the iPhone until after the iPhone 4 was release in June 2010.
Another contribution to the decline in Adobe Flash player is the rise of HTML5 support and overall performance. When HTML5 video support was introduced to Safari 4 (2008), Firefox 3.5 (2009) and finally Internet Explorer 9 (2011), developers began to take note of the increased performance over Flash Player. Naturally, HTML5 became the decision of choice for interactive media for the reason of performance.
Adobe Still Alive?
Flash is still used all over the web. The software is still used for video streaming, ads and even games. Even so, Flash is being used less as HTML5 becomes the preferred platform of choice for its optimized performance and cross-device compatibility.
Why is Adobe Not Used on All Mobile Devices?
The Apple fiasco
- Steve Jobs decided iPhone would not support Flash. The decision was supported with Flash’s limitation. The issues cause a painful experience for Apple platforms.
Drain on the phone battery
- Devices that support Flash suffer battery drain and performance issues. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to charge our phone every night?
Poor reliability, security and performance
- Symatec noted Flash as having one of the worst security performances in 2009.
What is Happening Now?
Flash Player may be seeing its end soon, but Adobe has added a new feature to Adobe Flash Pro CC allowing Flash users to export their content as HTML5. This is a great decision on Adobe’s part that will keep the name Flash around for some time.
Google has developed a Flash-to-HTML5 tool called Swiffy. You don’t need to download the software, it’s a web-based tool you can upload you Flash swf files, and it will spit out glorious HTML5 cross-browser compatible content. Developers take note: the code that Swiffy exports is not clean to work with. Swiffy is intended as a one-direction process for ported Flash content into HTML5.