A report from ZDNet appears to be showing that Adobe might be dropping future efforts for their Flash Player in the mobile world.  While there are probably more reasons for this than we will ever find out, the one that seems to be getting pushed is that Adobe is giving up on a losing battle. One site that offered this news to its readers even stated that Adobe Flash for mobile had only reached a fraction of the market. Well this is true as ½ is a fraction.

The original push to bring Flash to the mobile market was something of a pride thing between Adobe and Steve Jobs. At the same time we also saw Adobe working on hardware acceleration for some of their other plug-ins like Air and Edge. The thing is that as browsers both mobile and desktop move forward they are discovering (well they really always knew) that plug-ins are gigantic security holes, this is true for ANY plug-in not just Flash. If you follow security in the PC and mobile world at all you will find that this is very true and you will also see that browsers like IE, FireFox, Chrome and Safari are becoming les plug-in friendly. In fact FireFox 8 and the mobile FireFox have kicked out even more plug-ins than before.

This is Adobe’s motivation; they know that in the very near future they are going to have a very hard time getting their Flash plug-in to work at all. So they are kicking their work into CSS and HTML5 into high gear (something they should have done before). You will hear from multiple sites that this is Apple “winning out” or that Steve Jobs was right. Neither of these is completely true.  Apple has yet to realize HTML5 for most of their sites and continues to use their proprietary QuickTime plug in for their movie trailer site and for much of the code on Apple.com (although the mobile is moving to HTML5).  As for Steve Jobs being right; well the Adobe/Apple feud was about more than Flash on the iPhone. There was a time when Adobe optimized everything for Apple. If you wanted to run Photoshop with blazing speed, you bought a Mac. After Apple dumped the Power PC processor and forced Adobe to dump years of effort into optimizing for RISC (reduced instruction set) processors Adobe did an about face and began to optimize for Windows. To make matters worse after Apple jumped on the OpenCL bandwagon Adobe partnered up with nVidia to accelerate their applications with the closed source CUDA platform instead of the open standards found in OpenCL.

So you see this Flash Vs Apple war has been a long time in coming and it was the pride of two very large Egos that brought it out into the open. I am happy to see the plug-in go IF the replacement is more efficient and allows a better cross platform experience.

Source ZDNet

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