Will iPad kick Adobe Flash off the Internet?

IT security pro James Arlen thinks the iPad's anti-Flash design will be the death of Adobe's troubled software. Why he rejoices at the prospect.

By James Arlen

April 28, 2010 — CSO —

When the iPad was introduced, there was much furor over the fact that it is missing what some (a vocal minority) consider to be a key feature -- Adobe Flash support.

There are potentially dozens of reasons for the specific exclusion of this functionality -- but it's most likely that Steve Jobs would rather control the entirety of the user experience and lately Adobe hasn't been very interested in the user experience of Flash on OS X (it routinely pegs the processor for no apparent reason and Mr. Jobs has stated that the reason for the vast majority of all user experience crashes is Flash based on returned information from the OS X Crash Reporter)

From my perspective, this might be the move that saves the Internet.

Flash stinks in the best of times.

In much the same way that the walled garden of Facebook (aka AOL 2.0) is detrimental to the overall experience of the Internet by plowing all user experience through a single lens -- there is a www outside of facebook, just like there is an Internet outside of the web -- having a single purveyor of the Flash Interpreter means that there is always a constrictive "other" involved in the user experience.

Also see iPad payment apps: Too soon! on CSOonline.com

I can access resources on the Internet using a wide variety of protocols and programs. I can write my own interpreter of those protocols if I feel that reading raw packet dumps of HTTP sessions isn't the best way to access Wikipedia. I don't need to do any reverse engineering, I just need to read the specification and get on with it.

Adobe doesn't provide a specification for Flash. It's their thing and they're keeping it that way.

If we continue down the path of permitting Flash to dominate the user experience of information sharing, we're placing ourselves in the position of being forever beholden to Adobe -- or accepting the experience of a reverse engineered interpreter -- we're going right back to 1998 and the choice to buy MS Office 97 for $500 a seat or Corel WordPerfect for $80 a seat and accepting a substandard interpretation of the closed specification for Office file formats. How'd that turn out?

More than a decade later and no one can name a competitor word processor, and the only real innovation in desktop word processing has been the re-arrangement of menus! Competition is ALWAYS better for the consumer.

Right now, the vast majority of standard web pages are available on nearly anything that can interpret HTTP. My current desktop computer, my laptop, my netbook, my smartphone, my 10-year-old computer, my PS3, my MP3 player. The list goes on and on.

The list of devices that can display and utilize Flash content is much shorter -- and often includes cases where flash-only information would be useful: restaurant websites and smartphones are the most obvious examples. Nearly every restaurant gets this one so wrong it's painful. I think that discussing Flash interfaces in light of access for disabled people is a topic that needs to be covered -- your fancy font looks like crap and doesn't help with aging boomer eyes. And the plain old human-scale problems of your reinterpretation of UX design is like having the accelerator pedal turned into an ear-operated lever while moving the functionality of the steering wheel to the rear passenger's window crank.

Should we get into the security vulnerabilities of Flash? I don't think so, except to say that 2009 should be known as The Year of the Flash Vulnerability.

Apple has said "NO" to Adobe Flash and it's a great thing.

Of course you're buying into "the Apple experience" when you buy an iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad -- you are stuck in their vision of user centric computing - but they're doing some things which no one else seems to be able or capable of doing. They are redefining the information/data stack and the methods for users to interact with it. They redefined how individuals should interact with their media -- M4A and MP3 might not be what audiophiles are interested in, but they've made music, movies and TV shows more accessible and more usable for most of the world. They've made the gold standard.

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• From Microsoft to Adobe insecurity: One man's journey
• RSA 2010: Can Adobe Stop the Hate?
• The Apple way of (in)security