Will Flash Become Obsolete?
For years Lightray has used Flash in our websites for targeted interactive experiences, and for brand reinforcement, but we have long cautioned about it’s overuse. Pure flash websites up until recently do not index well on search engines (and still don’t unless you jump through rings of fire), require users to wait forever for a site to load (bad news now that everyone has A.D.D), and generally cost a lot of money to create (bad news in a bad economy.) Flash also inspires creative people to do unnecessary “neato” things that in our opinion just get in the way. Of course there are cool things you can do with Flash which are unique to it, but overall, it’s not our favorite.
Now it looks like Steve Jobs agrees. In an open letter on the Apple website he boldly argues his case for not supporting Flash on Apple Mobile devices. The letter points out a number of reasons, everything from the basic interactive experience of flash being incompatible with touch screens, to a more nerdy argument about Flash being a ‘closed’ proprietary platform. But the most damning thing he said in our opinion was this…
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
When Jobs says “PC-era-for PC’s and mice” he makes it sound as though Flash were still operating on old command line mainframes. In other words, the future is here, and Flash is not in it. Ouch!
