| > I'm still not sure what the general rationale was for flash support becoming uncool, technical or otherwise. Flash became a pseudo web-standard, and a closed one so. This meant Flash-support could only be implemented on devices and platforms Adobe decided to support. And Adobe's history when it comes to fixing bugs, problems and providing adequate support for anything but their #1 platform (Windows) was appalling. When Apple launched the iPhone, they decided that they didn't want their platform dependant on other's people code and limited to whatever effort Adobe would bother to put in. At the time it was a ballsy move, as flash was surely king. In retrospect, I think it worked out (mostly) fine and I'm glad they were willing to foot the risk. I say "mostly", because with Flash going away, people have been asking for the open HTML-standard to include closed elements which they earlier would typically do in Flash: DRM and friends. The result is that the open HTML standard is no longer open and that open-source software can no longer fully implement a standards-comliant web-browser, meaning you can only get "working" browsers from the big guys like Apple, Google and Microsoft. That's a terrible loss for the web and for the future. |
So Apple only had the choice between no Flash and a really bad version. Flash ran really slow on OSX compared to Windows, so it was unrealistic to expect Adobe to suddenly provide a good implementation of Flash for the iPhone. Adobe painted them into the corner by not properly supporting small platforms.