Over the years, I have seen many sites go from no-flash to flash back to no-flash. Once the novelty of the little kind-of-app-with-fancy-graphics wears off, users who are left with having to wait for ever for a page to load, or having the browser give up the ghost, or wanting to go straight to the point, end up frustrated.
The world of browsers, spurred on by Safari's and Chrome's webkit engine performance has increased its speed by leaps and bounds. Firefox is staying close to these two with the latest Gekko updates, and IE - the snail of browsers (still today) - is doing its best to be fast...
Web sites that do NOT use flash, have extremely fast load times, even with complicated CSS and java script usage. But not so with flash.
In the world of mobiles, it's obvious, Flash is NOWHERE to be seen (well, there is Flash Lite for some - rare - smart-phones, but the truth is that it is OLD flash, and it is still a hog).
Flash's problem is that it is completely proprietary. The player is proprietary, and the tools are proprietary. The content is not, of course, hence the reason why programmer will say it is not, and they will show Flash specifications to confirm it. But the truth is, Flash is proprietary. Adobe rules supreme over the present and future of Flash, its players, and its tools.
I understand Adobe's position. They make A LOT of money from Flash, even if the player is free. Until HTML 5 came along, Flash was the de-facto standard for feature 'rich' web content ('rich' is a term that Microsoft - mainly Bill Gates - coined and used for anything and everything the company made, and is now used everywhere to mean anything from 'not character based', to 'whooping 3D with surround sound and mouse gesture word processor').
The truth is, the Web doesn't NEED flash. It may look convenient, but its convenience made for lazy programming and lazy design. I mean: how many times has an awarded web site been a heavy user of Flash? The technology itself may have been OK in a PC-centric world, but its proprietary nature, its poor resulting applications (let's be honest, in the main, Flash applications are not THAT great, are they?), and its performance is a NO-GO in a mobile-centric world.
Hence the aggressive PR battle that Adobe is forging against Apple, the convenient scapegoat to gloss over the inadequacies and lies of Flash.
The fact is, the main programmers of Flash applications are Windows guys. The Linux world hardly uses Flash, Mac users hate it, and it is quasi non-existent in the mobile world. However, this is not advertised by Adobe or their Flash proponents (who make a comfortable living from making applications with it).
Real programmers (sorry to the others), designers of elegant and performing web sites, don't use Flash, and are looking at HTML 5 specifications with a lot of interest. And so are CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, CTOs, COOs, who see where the shift in consumer usage is going: Smart phones, very portable computers (desktop computer purchase is now lagging behind laptops and netbooks by a significant margin), mobile activity. And they are moving their web sites to no-flash content in increasing measure.
The snowball is gathering momentum.
As every passes Flash is losing ground.
Adobe is losing its battle. Bye bye Flash. And good riddance.
