ChrisPosterous

I have been putting off this blog post for a couple of days now, but a recent article at ZDNet got me thinking about this again - Flash is a flawed technology that tries to add value but actually removes it from the browsing experience. While I feel sorry for Adobe that yet once again, they cannot demonstrate Flash for mobile without it crashing, it really is not only Adobe that can be blamed for the general state of plug-in hell that the internet became as the result of IE 6 and Active X. Any time you add a second (or third of fourth) layer of complexity to a web browser, bad things tend to happen.

In all honesty, the case of the recent Mobile Flash Crash is more than likely a persistent memory leak that has plagued Flash from when it was a Macromedia product. It handles cached data and memory allocation poorly. And this is not just a mobile thing. Flash is flaky on all platforms. It's flaky on my Windows 7 machine. Its an abstraction layer that seems to hate all browsers other than Firefox, and even then, can be a tad fussy. I view a platform dependent plug-in as a fence that keeps me out of where I want to play on the net. Steve Rubel described this experience as the "swiss cheese" web on a recent Facebook post. Just like the archaic requirement of needing IE6 and ActiveX that locked me out of whole areas of the early web as a Mac user, requiring plug-ins to see any content is ridiculous in our HTML 5 world. It feels like a lazy way out. And I am tired of it.

As an example, exactly two weeks ago I visited the HBO web site which is a heavy flash user. My browser of choice is Google Chrome on Windows 7. When I got to the site, all I could see was the wonderful flash-is-missing message (and a suggesting I use a different browser, like Chrome, which by the way is what I was using) and nothing else. No text-only version of the site, no back button, no anything. My next stop was a google search for the problem which suggested I switch to the beta channel for Chrome to get the plug in to work properly. What?? And this is on a mainstream computer, running a mainstream (supposedly majority OS) and a browser that supposedly has Flash built in.  What a cluster.

I find it laughable that there is this raging debate over who is right on the issue of Flash on iPhone and iPad, Apple or Adobe. Why is this even a question? Clearly my experience on Windows shows that even mature versions of this technology on mainstream OS's and browsers can be less than optimal. If you have control of your ecosystem, why invite the spoiler to the party and bring your users the same level of disappointment I experienced with Flash? It's time to say no to the fiefdoms and "walled gardens" of the plug-in world. Yes, Apple-haters, I am using your own terminology against you to describe exactly what Adobe has created, a walled garden, usually filled with pretty flowers, but many of them with huge thorns. Until developers stop buying into the hype of these closed platforms under the guise that they are open, we will forever be stuck with these types of horrendous user experiences. Flash is neither open source nor free, we need to stop thinking that Adobe's motives are 100% altruistic (they are making good money selling Flash development tools). Apple is not innocent in this regard either, requiring iPhone developers to have a Mac and specific developer tools to make an App Store app. Both companies motives are profit driven, but the difference is that we can have a lot of the things Flash delivers without relying on Flash. And if the experience is better, it benefits all users, not just Apple's users.

It's time to take a stand and support HTML5 standards that work with a plain vanilla browser, without the overhead of another layer of code that may or may not work in the future. Bjorn Enki, on his web design blog, makes a great case for not using Flash in website design. I for one can't wait till Flash and other plugins are no longer needed for modern web browsing. Only then will we have truly open, unwalled gardens on the internet.