Lisa Forgan's Blog

As technology advances the war of who will dominate the internet goes further in depth. We all know from the past about the browser wars. IE (Microsoft) wants to do their own thing while the other browser do another. W3C was created (web standards) to help stop this madness. Of course, certain things never change (like IE6). Now, comes the battle between Adobe and Apple. Interactivity and Rich media. This time it is all about flash support.

Apple has no desire to support flash. There are several reasons that flash isn't supported by iPhone, iPad, and other iDevices are because of:
Flash's lack of respect for battery life to the "reliability, security, and performance" problems of many Flash apps.

But Flash is still supported by the web and most mobile devices. It still has rich multimedia capabilities and is considered to be graphically interactive.

What does this mean for the future?

With HTML 5, it means that there will be more ways to display multimedia BUT only if you are capable of writing apps and getting them cross-browser and media device compatible. JavaScript can handle certain animations and interactivity that flash does but still isn't as capable of creating a full rich media experience. For now, don't expect flash to die or to go anywhere. It is still being used and Adobe is trying to improve their feature and client's needs.

Who does this effect?

Mainly, companies that specialize in just flash based sites and/or applications. Unfortunately, with the lack of apple's support in flash, this can cause a backup or controversy with clients who want their website to work in all forms of devices. It will also cause a downfall in these types of corporations if flash eventually does fall off the side of the planet. In other corporations, it can increase the need for JavaScript gurus to help develop supporting apps to make features similar to flash work across both browsers and mobile devices.

But, for now, we will just have to wait and see who wins this war.

Microsoft's point of view in this war:

Hachamovitch's explains that H.264 will be the only video codec natively supported by IE9 and he expects it be the codec of choice for HTML5. He smashes Firefox as he claims it can't provide native support. Therefore, In the
future of HTML5 where neither Flash nor Silverlight will be required to play embedded Web video, Firefox gets aced out.

Apple's point of view in this war:

Job's most important reason for shutting out Flash is that it's a cross-platform development tool. In other words, he doesn't want the competition and wrapping himself in HTML 5 is a way to look "open" as he no longer supports flash. He show's through the Apple's App Store that flash isn't always necessary to create graphically rich applications.

Adobe's point of view:

So far, this war has caused a downfall in Adobe's flash products. Even so, it is still the favored format for delivering interactive and video advertising. To stall falling sales, Adobe recently acquired analytics powerhouse Omniture for $1.8B. This will help understand what the click-through rates of those ads were in real time
and to be able to take more advantage of it.