Future of Flash

"19 out of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide have <i>committed to</i> shipping Flash technology on their devices"<p>It would be more wise to actually wait till you can deliver a decent Flash implementation on a mobile device before touting your mobile position. Because your mobile position right now is that you have been promising the world but not delivering jack.

It's funny to see Adobe listing things like Gnash, Haxe, and Red5 as advantages of Flash, after impeding their early development.

They might have open-sourced the code of Flash, but getting bugs fixed and critical enhancements implemented in the Flash player (or in Flex) is still a lengthy, opaque process that takes years. It took them 3 years to add a global exception handler and fix the scrollbars in Mac, for pete's sake!<p>As a Flex developer, that pisses me off to no end. I work in Flash all the time, and I use it because I have no choice, to do what I want to do, but I hate Flash because Adobe is so glacially slow at implementing small, obvious fixes to make my work easier.

I wonder how many times Adobe has these same arguments pasted all over their site. The exchange has been had. If you tried any harder to push your relevance, you might even come off as a little desperate.

Their new slogan should be "Flash: at least you're still locked into it for the next half decade if you want to support IE 8."

Despite all these high figures and percentages, I still typically find Flash annoying, bar video players. What now?

Oh, sure. H.264 is just a codec, and &#60;video&#62; is just an HTML tag, but somehow, that's exactly what I want. I can (very easily) make a H.264 or Ogg Theora video and wrap it inside &#60;video&#62; tag and it is going to work, I don't even know how I would do that with your "complete solution for advanced video distribution". Except "put it on youtube", of course.

"For existing Flash content developed with mouse input in mind, Flash Player will automatically convert the touch events into mouse events. This allows Flash content designed for the desktop, to work seamlessly on touch-based devices."<p>I can't wait to try <a href="http://www.dontclick.it/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dontclick.it/</a> on a touch based device!

The article is more about present than the future.<p>Instead why not focus on filling the gaps? There are still so many things that HTML5 and browsers cant do. Wasn't that the reason Flash came into existence in the first place.

Those stats are useless.<p>Microsoft had 95% of the browser market at some point.<p>I'd also like to know how 98% of enterprises "rely" on Flash. I think if Flash was completely obliterated, those enterprises would be largely unharmed.

Adobe: Please stop defending flash and get on with your life. Build us the HTML tools you said you would and do it so fast that I will forget about all this flash stuff.<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/adobe-cto-kevin-lynch-were-going-to-make-the-best-tools-in-the-world-for-html5/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/adobe-cto-kevin-lynch-were-...</a>

youporn.com has implemented HTML5 video. Flash is dead.

There are a lot of opinions on the future of Flash. It would be interesting to see the statistics at the top of the article from now on, to see if flash will shrink fast, slowly or remain strong. Or even grow, but I would not bet on this last one.

No flash on the iPad is a reasonably big deal for me. I almost bought one, then realized that I couldn't use Hulu or Amazon Video on Demand with it.<p>I use those for ALL of my TV needs. Watching TV in bed with an iPad was actually the most attractive use case to me, until I realized it wouldn't work.<p>So I didn't buy one.<p>Edit: I don't particularly love Flash for its own sake. I just want to use the services that I've come to like. And apparently, right now, Flash is the only realistic way to get them. HTML5 is, apparently, not quite there yet.

From my view, the only real closed thing in Flash is that they do not allow SWF renderers others than the Flash Player itself. (If any mobile company can create their own renderer, then, why license players from Adobe)<p>Then another problem appears, if anyone can create their own players, then they might introduce differences(Java vs J++ long ago)<p>GNASH being mentioned on an official page, i can not believe my eyes!!!

I was surprised to see that only 70% of web games use flash. Anyone have any idea on what's in the remaining 30%?

It's a good thing they didn't have any flash on this page or my browser would have crashed before I was able to finish reading all the reasons that flash is awesome and I can't live without it.

98% of enterprises rely on flash player ?

Less talk more action

here is a website for the debate: <a href="http://applevsadobe.net" rel="nofollow">http://applevsadobe.net</a>