According to Adobe, the company who have been behind it for the last three years, some 99.3% of desktop computers have Flash installed. We're all pretty familiar with the process; you visit a website, it tells you it can't display the content – but hey, it could if you installed the latest version of Flash, which it handily links to. You quickly install it, restart the browser, and bingo – your browser is now a willing receptacle for all kinds of content, notably YouTube and Google Video, but also a huge number other sites that employ it for navigation and animation. After all, if you're a website developer, and you know that nearly everyone visiting your site has some kind of Flash player installed, the temptation to make use of its vector graphics and video streaming capabilities is pretty irresistable.
But with more people accessing the internet on mobile devices, the ability to access all this Flash content is limited – and there's a battle quietly being waged to stop Flash having the dominance on mobile phones that it enjoys on computers.
At the forefront of this, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Apple. Flash famously doesn't run on the iPhone on the iPod touch, and not even in the Flash Lite format that's been successfully ported to around half a billion portable devices currently in pockets and handbags around the globe. There have been several mooted reasons for Apple's reluctance to embrace Flash; the first that's often cited is the drain on the battery. It's all very well offering cutting-edge web content, but dealing with irate customers complaining of the speed at which the battery runs down is obviously something that companies are keen to avoid. Secondly, Steve Jobs has been heard to be rather sniffy about Flash, with the full-blown version "too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and Flash Lite "not capable of being used with the Web."
Adobe claim that they're working on an iPhone version of Flash, but say that its deployment on the device is "down to Apple". Some industry commentators have noted that Apple's reluctance might be down to Flash's success as a development platform; to allow full-blown Flash content on the iPhone would suddenly allow thousands of free Flash applications to be used on the iPhone, in direct competition with the ones it's selling through its App store.
Adobe are also working on bringing fully-fledged Flash to Windows Mobile and Google (Android) phones very soon. Microsoft's Silverlight – a direct competitor to Flash – is already available on Nokia and Windows Mobile devices. And with last week's launch of Google's Video Chat, there are murmurs that Google are making their own forays into multimedia plugins, which might well surface on their phones in the near future. Of course, by bundling a standalone YouTube application with the iPhone, Apple have attempted to head off criticism for not allowing people to use youtube.com in the phone's browser. But how long can Apple hold out against Flash, with thousands of customers making it abundantly clear that they want their phone to have the same browsing capabilities as their dated desktop computer?
CONFUSED ABOUT TECHNOLOGY? SUBMIT YOUR QUERIES TO CYBERCLINIC USING THE COMMENT FORM BELOW, OR EMAIL QUESTIONS HERE.
Apple doing something useful? Yowsers.
I have flash installed. I also have flashblock installed. If there's flash on a site, it'll run when I want it to, and not because the site wants to use stupid, search-unfriendly, inaccessible navigation features or spam me with adverts floating across the screen.
Flash is good for spot effects, and stuff like YouTube--designers using it to actually power their site are just that, 'designers', they don't know enough about how the web actually works to build a proper site.
The other option Apple could have for sites like YouTube is to use some sort of FLV converter and make the files DL then run in an effective format.
Posted by: MatGB | Tuesday, 18 November 2008 at 01:41 PM
trading comments medium fuels
Posted by: oxtonshiel | Sunday, 25 October 2009 at 12:31 AM
180 december limits shop concentrations united
Posted by: radolphrei | Sunday, 25 October 2009 at 12:33 AM