HTML5 beats Flash for mobile
21/11/2011
Adobe have just announced that they will be withdrawing from the mobile browser market and not competing with HTML5 for providing rich Internet content on mobiles.
This decision is not a surprise as Flash technology has not been supported on the iPhone, and is a direct consequence of Apples' decision to block third party browser plugins like Flash.
So what is the future for Flash on the rest of the Internet? This is up for debate and many people will conclude that Flash websites will not be around in 3 years time. But these are the same people who might have said that IE6 would not be around now.
There are still very good reasons for choosing Flash for some website developments as this offers the best solution in many cases. The proposed technology for HTML5 is still not mature is most browsers, and in reality gives a poor result. Even ignoring the widely used legacy IE6 browser, the support in browsers such as Chrome and Firefox is variable and certainly many of the proposed standard HTML5 features are not available across all the main browsers.
So the state of the technology will slow down the migration off Flash for publically accessible websites.
But there are other areas in which Flash has huge advantages, and this is code and content protection. Or Digital Rights Management (DRM) to use one common phrase. Valuable code such as calculators or animations are far better coded with Flash as this allows a proper DRM policy to be maintained.
We therefore predict a decline in use of Flash in websites for the simple banner graphics but little change in its use for valuable interactive applications which require some kind of DRM or copy protection.
This decision has not changed our current digital design policy; we have already been using mobile compatible technology where appropriate and continue to use Flash technology where this offers a better solution, usually for high-end applications such as ROI calculators.
