Hopefully the absence of Flash on <i>both</i> major mobile platforms will help speed its demise on non-mobile platforms as well.<p>On the other hand, this news might just precede another announcement from Google saying "don't worry, Adobe doesn't support it anymore, but we do", just as they did for Flash on Linux.
It appears that no one who has commented so far has used Flash on ICS.<p>I use Flash on my Galaxy Nexus, and it runs perfectly fine for everything I want to look at. Sure, it's rubbish for things like games and full-flash websites (the latter should be long gone by now anyway) but for watching Flash videos on news websites it's fantastic, and it works just as well as it does on the desktop.<p>I want Flash gone as much as the next guy, but video on HTML5 is no more usable.
What's Adobe's long term strategy here? I'm happy to see it go, but this seems like it would just be hasten the demise of Flash on the internet. I haven't been following this, but assumed that Adobe benefited from the ubiquity Flash on the desktop. Have they just chosen to get out of this market altogether and concentrate their efforts elsewhere? Or is there a master plan I'm not seeing?
It's interesting how hard they are pushing this; there is still quite a lot of Flash on the web ... at least most smaller sites hosting / streaming video seem to still rely on it. I actually would have thought they could make a decent bit of revenue just by offering it to OEMs as a selling point. Perhaps they see even more revenue by forcing all the recalcitrant sites still using Flash to buy Adobe's tools as the easiest upgrade path to get onto HTML5.
I'm afraid the reason Flash works poorly on platforms other than Win32 and Adobe is dropping the platform support is that they don't have the people that understand their code anymore, and there's noone to make it run (properly) on new platforms.
There is the downside to this, in that by forcing rapid adoption of web video via <video> they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked by mpeg open source video software is doomed. Why can't we just use ogv :(
If Adobe allows Google to adopt flash and continue support to develop and support it then I don't see any problem. Android is Google's baby so they need to adopt the flash development. Adobe is fecked up if they don't allow it.<p>As far Flash being terrible. I have never had any negative experiences. This blanket negative view of flash is just hype. It is used all over the place. In the hands of a bad programmer, any application can be terrible.<p>Performance tests between flash and html5 don't show much advantage to using html5.<p>The PRIMARY and ONLY reason for moving to html5 is that it is not proprietary.<p>As far as security hole, it was put there intentionally. Windows OS is one big security hole so it is like pointing to a tree in a forest. Other reasons are frivolous.<p>So we should move towards html5 but keep flash player working on all platforms until full migration of internet occurs to html5. There is simply too much flash content so it will take a long time to migrate.
Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible <i>user experience</i>.<p>One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a <i>feature</i>.<p>Flash isn't horrible <i>per se</i>. It's horrible because Adobe is completely incompetent in making it run stably and on platforms other than Windows (and even there it's a stretch). Were they competent and the Flash experience just worked, I'd be fine with it.<p>The suckiness of Flash is what's driving the adoption of HTML5/JS because, let's face it, HTML5/JS isn't exactly a mature platform yet.<p>I just wish there was a way I could run a browser with Flash even installed without being bugged by "You're missing plugins. Would you like to install them?" Flashblock, Click-to-Flash and the like help but I'd rather not have the software installed at all.<p>It makes me sad that Chrome bundles Flash and can't have it conveniently extracted either.<p>To be fair, Apple didn't kill Flash (much as I'd like to give them credit for it). Adobe did.
Flash is a platform and it is very unique virtual machine. It has its own features. Since it is a virtual machine it has great potential. I think most problematic part that Adobe has to face is fragmentation. It is very complex task to maintain a complex VM ( which consists of very high level graphics capabilities) to run smoothly on every single hardware. Flash has provided lots of great stuff which is not provided by any platform before. Even now there is no any other choice for specific tasks like P2P video.
I can't understand why they haven't just made FP open source... Flash on the web is maybe dead, but it is still usable for kiosks, games and AIR-related stuff (AIR used to be a best idea for platform-independent wrapper of active PDFs, thus killing it is a strike into this technology). So it is possible to sustain the Flash market for years with minimal costs...
This is a good move. I'm glad Adobe is coming to terms with the end of Flash. Moving resources away from Flash to other areas where Adobe is successful is a win for everyone.
its not really that adobe won't support it. its that chrome is default and never supported it.<p>I bet we can install ICS's flash and whatever req. libs and it works with other browsers.