Opera has joined in the argument over Flash, with the company telling TechRadar that it will support Flash for the time being, but that Adobe needs to start embracing web standards if it doesn't want to come under constant attack.
Opera's growing influence in browsers has been illustrated by the huge take-up of the Opera browser for iPhone, but as that company shocked the tech world by actually getting the product through Apple's vetting process, Adobe found itself under fire from Steve Jobs himself.
Opera's product analyst Phillip Grønvold believes that support for Flash is critical at the current time, but that times are changing fast as HTML5 moves closer.
Dependant on Flash
"Today's internet content is dependant on Flash," said Grønvold. "If you remove Flash you do not have today's internet.
"We are trying to give the best internet experience for our users therefore we need Flash - there is no way to beat around that bush."
"But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology.
"Flash does have its purposes and will have its purposes, the same as [Microsoft's] Silverlight and others, especially for dynamic content.
"But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there's a reason for that."
Change needed
Grønvold believes that Adobe must move fast to embrace the openness of the web if it is to evade the kind of PR disaster that was Jobs' uncharacteristically lengthy diatribe about the company.
"For some reason it's not part of the fabric of the web currently and Flash either needs to include itself in the future of the web and open web standards or its technology is going to be consistently under attack from all sides as the open web standard movement grows further and further," said Grønvold.
"Because eventually we will have the canvas [of the web] in good quality and we'll have the toolsets to use that canvas in the quality but in the foreseeable future, 18 months or so, Flash is not going away and it is critical."
So, no stinging rebuke from Opera – but it is clear that the web giants are not rushing to defend Adobe from the might of Apple, and that in itself speaks volumes.
Your comments (17) Click to add a new comment
chuya
May 12th 2010
17. correction: "Jobs IS an OS Genius"
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chuya
May 12th 2010
16. FlashBuilder 4 (Flex) is AIR and MXML. After careful consideration and looking at all the options.., imho Adobe Flash with AIR is years ahead of everything else. I predict it will be the App developer tool of choice for many years, There is nothing even close.
Anyone who bets against Adobe does not know how many times, since the 80's, that Adobe's death knell had been rung. But Adobe has always won out with consistently superior technology and better products.
I am a fan and design and develop large scale business systems for a living these days.
The developer team uses Apple 'cause Job's IS and OS Genius. OS/X is sweet. Hope Steve and Adobe kiss and make up.
Gerard Carton
Rock Island, Illinois
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fnsntst
May 10th 2010
15. @thebrokenapple: Opera has more than 100 million users worldwide :) And Opera and Safari have two of the most advanced browser engines available!
@pnord: "I find it suspicious that Opera takes this stance a couple weeks after Apple finally allows the Opera browser on their devices, which they previously had not."
Opera Software has always had this stance. It is just you who didn't pay attention to it until now.
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singapura
May 7th 2010
14. What irritates me tremendously is that most people think that you can only have Flash OR HTML 5. What happened with free choice? Jobs wants to Disneyfi the internet and have tight control over content. Flash doesn't want to conform and therefor needs to go. I'd like to be able to choose what I can do with my iPad or iPhone. Flash is part of that equation. I don't mind if Flash disappears but it shouldn't be because Jobs doesn't like Adobe. Let the users decide, not the suppliers.
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ibrent
May 7th 2010
13. I totally agree. HTML5 on the iPad is the way to go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4
It's so good to see how well HTML5 works on mobile devices. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUw7RyBrZA
Totally.
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macsdounix
May 7th 2010
12. Let's see now. Adobe is claiming a market penetration of near 99 percent:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
But it is Apple that is the "closed" company? Why do we want one company - and a company with a horrendous record of security problems - controlling video playback on the web? Sure, as some have said, Adobe does other things with Flash than just dynamic content, but that's what the majority of people use it for and care about. Few users care about or require Flex, with all due respect.
Plus, everyone misses the obvious reality of the situation: Apple does not control its competitors. If Apple bets wrong on Flash, then the company soon will regret it. The marketplace will teach Apple a valuable lesson. This is why I believe all of the drama is so telling. Flash developers and Adobe itself fear that Apple is NOT wrong and that the marketplace will agree with Apple.
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thebrokenapple
May 6th 2010
11. Sorry Natively*
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thebrokenapple
May 6th 2010
10. What Browser? Who uses Opera... Way to go Apple... let's support the least used browsers on the net (Safari & Opera) and let's travel back in time and let's go back to when the web was just type and images and all we had was HTML... Why don't we go back to writing on Stone Tablets... sorry Stone Pads!
This statement might mean something to me if it wasn't coming from one of the world's worst browsers. I tried it on my phone and it's slower then molasses. Who the hell cares about Opera!!
Cook an egg?!?! F*CK have you seen how hot the iPhone gets just playing videos Nativity!?! You can start a Fire!!!
Not to mention the iPad Shuts down after prolonged use because of over heating.
Opera should STFU if they know what's good for them.
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pnord
May 6th 2010
9. I find it suspicious that Opera takes this stance a couple weeks after Apple finally allows the Opera browser on their devices, which they previously had not.
Apple is one of the most closed companies out there. Let's see if they don't change their tune after the anti-trust probe. If there's a viable alternative to Flash, let's see it because it's definitely not html5.
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charbax
May 6th 2010
8. Good idea from master Norwegian Opera, please continue campaigning for Adobe to "simply" open the source code for free and make it free. With good optimizations, videos in flash shouldn't use any more power, with hardware acceleration on all platforms.
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studentrights
May 6th 2010
7. Flash is Dead. The author is right... no one is running to defend Adobe and all the big sites are rushing to support 100 million iPhone, Touch and iPad devices out there now. It's a market to big to ignore.
Once you take video out of the equation, Flash fills a 10% niche. With H264 being 66% of the web, up from 33% last year, it is currently set to hit 90% in the next 6-12 months. H264 is the primary codec of Flash 10 FLV and H264 funny enough, can be served up without Flash.
Adobe has thus insured the success of HTML 5 video with H264, which YouTube and many other sites are already doing.
The only people auguring for Flash are Adobe and Flash developers and consumers who don't know they can get 90% of Flash content without Flash, using H264, which as I said is already being done.
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evertsfnic
May 6th 2010
6. Flash right now it's the best. If a browser does not support Flash is dead!!!!!! It will take a lot of time to kill flash. I don't think that flash will die....
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patrickgoss
May 6th 2010
5. @ all of you - important points - and as Gronveld says: "Flash does have its purposes and will have its purposes, the same as [Microsoft's] Silverlight and others, especially for dynamic content."
He used an example of integration of Flash in cars, FYI :)
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awjr
May 6th 2010
4. Seriously people need to look at what is being done with Flash and not where it was 3 years ago.
The biggest 'feature' of Flash these days is the Flex development environment (now at version 4). As a developer, it allows me to create hugely complex business applications that run anywhere.
Flash is not just video and pretty vector graphics, it hasn't been for years.
Nothing like Flash ads to ruin people's perceptions :)
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mobius
May 6th 2010
3. Flash and HTML5 aren't mutually exclusive. HTML5 will be able to take over some stuff that only Flash could do but there's so much more and so just like HTML4, we're going to still see a mutally beneficial relationship between HTML5 and Flash. Each do their own things well and there is more overlap now HTML has caught up with the 21st century. But saying one replaces the other demonstrates a severe lack of understanding, maybe not their fault if they've had little experience.
We've developed entire self contained applications in Flash that would have been impossible, never mind uneconomical, to build in HTML (even if we had full HTML5 implementation and adding in php, javascript, CSS etc).
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mobius
May 6th 2010
2. @house, What do you think Flash actually is? "Flash" now covers an entire development platform, not just simply video playing in browsers. HTML5 might possibly cover a fraction of what "Flash" actually does today but mowhere near even a majority of it even including adding in other standards, JS, Ajax, etc etc.
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house
May 6th 2010
1. The more I read into this the more I agree with Apple. Times they are a changin', Adobe has had a good ride, it's time to let go.
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