Pitted against Microsoft’s efforts to crush Flash using its own copycat Silverlight platform, open source projects seeking to duplicate Flash for free, and Apple’s efforts to create a mobile platform wholly free of any trace of Flash, Adobe has scrambled to announce efforts to make Flash a public specification in the Open Screen Project.
Will it help get Flash on the iPhone? Here’s the first segment of a three part series with a historical overview of the wars between Flash and Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Google, and the open source community, the problems Flash faces today, and what future Flash can hope for as an open specification.
Continues: AppleInsider | Flash Wars: Adobe in the History and Future of Flash
Incidentally, Flash was the subject of the first article I wrote on RoughlyDrafted: Flash in the Plan
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3 comments ↓
Did we forget about Adobe’s continuing folly? Oh wait, that was Java… Still, It seems that both MS and Adobe are getting increasingly desperate when it comes to mobiles. Granted, MS has been using this business model for a while, but they’re having to sponsor big events just to get the name out there (Dems Convention), much less have people inform themselves about it.
At least one good thing came from Vista’s continuing failure- many more people know not to jump on the new MS software bandwagon
My greatest concern about Flash remains its mysterious and quasi-unethical handling of cookies, which raises significant privacy and security concerns:
http://phonedifferent.com/2008/03/flash_redux_their_plugin_your.html
Yeah, what’s done with Flash cookies is an interesting issue. You can access a settings manager by right-clicking a Flash object on a page, but how many people know that?
http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-122.htm
Generally speaking, Flash is useful for some purposes (though only because better solutions haven’t been cross-platform) but more often it’s a nuisance. Most people have better things to do with their time than be irked by cheesy ads and doubtless most of those who are technologically informed make use of Flash-blockers.
I’d be happy to see it die — unless it’s Silverlight that kills it. Since Microsoft controls that, that would be out of the frying pan and into the fire.
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