KillerSites Blog

Adobe Officially Kills Flash

November 11, 2011

Well, it seems that the combination of Steve Jobs + HTML 5 = Flash is Dead.

… No, the above is not a great sentence but it does tell the truth: Adobe’s decision is a death-sentence for Flash – a soon to be forgotten technology in the ever growing bin of dead and dying technologies:

  • Cobol
  • Macromedia Director
  • Java Applets

… And many, many more.

Adobe Officially Kills Flash

Adobe Systems Inc halted development of its Flash Player for mobile browsers, surrendering to Apple Inc in a war over Web standards as the company surprised investors with a restructuring plan.

While the matter might seem like inside baseball for the average person, it is likely to improve the browsing experiences of tens of millions of iPhone and iPad users, who have trouble accessing sites built with Flash.

That is because Adobe’s decision means Web developers who currently use Flash tools to produce Web content will likely move over to the newer HTML5 technology, which Adobe embraced on Wednesday.

Yes, Flash will still be used here and there for gaming web sites … at least for a little while, but soon enough HTML 5 and CSS 3 development tools will replace everything that you do with Flash.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I stopped any further development of Flash related training video courses.

Bonus: Video Blog on the Flash:

UPDATE and clarification:

In a nutshell, I think that mobile devices will very quickly be the dominant device used to surf the Web and as such, most developers (in time) will choose to develop on the universal platform (HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript) rather than Flash.

That all said, I bet that Adobe will turn the Flash application into a powerhouse HTML 5 and CSS 3 creator.

I hope that clarifies my position.

Stefan Mischook