Earlier this month Steve Jobs made headlines when he declared that Google's "Don’t Be Evil!" motto was a load of crap and Adobe was just plain lazy. Now, Adobe doesn’t take kindly to that kind of talk and on Tuesday, CTO Kevin Lynch took to the Adobe blog to discuss the future of Flash.
Beginning with the snide snipe, "Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device," Lynch published a blog post defending Flash, which Steve Jobs said was pretty much dead anyway. According to Jobs, Flash will soon be obsolete because, "the world is moving toward HTML5."
Lynch points out that over 85 percent of the top web sites contain Flash content and Flash runs on over 98 percent of computers on the Web. "It is used for the majority of casual games, video, and animation on the Web and familiar brands like Nike, Hulu, BBC, Major League Baseball, and more rely on Flash to deliver the most compelling experiences to over a billion people," he writes.
Lynch also disagrees with the notion that soon HTML5 will replace Flash. "Some point to HTML as eventually supplanting the need for Flash," he writes, adding that he doesn't see it happening in the foreseeable future. Mr. Lynch claims that users and content creators could be 'thrown back to the dark ages of video on the web' if faced with the compatibility issues of HTML5.
"Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."
And, in contrast to Steve's statement about Adobe being 'lazy' and not doing enough with its potential, Lynch says:
"We have shown that Flash technology is starting to work on these [Apple] devices today by enabling standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash … This same solution will work on the iPad as well."
According to Lynch Adobe is ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices "if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users," but to date Adobe has not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.
