The Flash Battle

Since Apple unveiled the iPad last Wednesday a large focus has been centered on the lack of Flash support.

Sides were quickly formed; Pro-Flash or Anti-Flash.

The Pro-Flash side calling it absolutely unacceptable for a modern and powerful media device to not allow Flash content.

The Anti-Flash side points out the public lack of support on the iPhone along with major reasons to despise the technology.

The Pro-Flash camp pointed out sites like Hulu and YouTube for video, and the numerous games available only through a Flash interface. Adobe even chimed in with a blog post presenting their argument for Flash.

And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.

They have a valid (somewhat) point that the flash platform allows flexibility and a maturity that does not exist in other technologies such as HTML5.

The Flash Blog (An independent site evangelizing the Flash platform) was quick to point out how widespread the content is including pointing out very obviously the porn side of the web. They used a very effective tagline in the post that had twitter ablaze with arguments.

Millions of websites use Flash. Get used to the blue legos.

On the other side of the fence was the Anti-Flash camp, pointing out statements that Flash is the leading cause of crashes on Mac's. The fact that it is a huge CPU hog and that is just a bad format. I would generally count myself in this camp, my MacBook runs Flash content horribly. HTML5 is going to be great, especially when paired with the advances in AJAX. Recently YouTube started making the switch to HTML5 and H.264 for video presentation this can potentially be seen as evidence of the decline.

I wish the arguments regarding Flash were so simple. Yes, Flash is a CPU hog, but it is consistently pointed out "Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs." This is suspect as it can be done, but not easily. There are numerous blog posts regarding this topic, Daring Fireball has done a great job of covering this so far. Over the weekend Wil Shipley chimed in on twitter and started a firestorm. Everyone expected an Apple stalwart to be on the Anti-Flash side, but he shocked many and started the flamewar with this simple post.

Honestly, I don't understand Flash-haters. It's a content type. It's prevalent. The iPhone and iPad should understand it.

and this one:

Apple: Get off your ass and write a minimal Flash player. Everyone else: Stop acting like not being able to see video is cool.

This is when things got very interesting for me. I tried following the back and forth, but the replies came out of the woodwork. Dig through the twitterverse for more from Wil and his followers.

TUAW pointed out that Steve Jobs held an internal town hall meeting with Apple employees at the end of last week. He is cited (No official source) as saying:

On Adobe: "They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it.

An interesting trend evolved on twitter asking for flash statistics from google analytics. The hash tag can give you some insight.

This morning came this from Fanboy.com likening Flash to Director, some good insights and one line I'll end this article with

The truth is that this isn’t a technical issue but a political one.