Flash: A Dying Trend

In case you didn’t hear last week, Steve Jobs told Adobe what’s up. Flash was a necessary evil, back in the day, to make interactive websites possible. The downside has always been that you have to install a third-party browser plugin in order for the Flash content to display. For entire Flash websites, this means that you can’t view anything unless you have the plugin.

Search engines can’t even index the content on a Flash website very well, if at all. With HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, any modern web browser natively supports most of the interactivity that used to require a special Flash interface. Animations and other cool effects can be done with JavaScript. Even video streaming doesn’t require Flash any more.

Flash was essentially a way for developers to do things that web browsers weren’t ready for yet. It was a hack, for the time being. The big difference is that now content doesn’t have to be encoded into a movie file that only a proprietary plugin can play. Web content should adhere to open standards, making it available to any platform, and that’s the point that Steve Jobs is making.

Basically, Flash is obsolete.