

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? - spicyj
http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/blue_boxes

======
jsz0
In the midst of the iPad Flash controversy I think people are overlooking that
Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007.
They missed their promise to deliver a beta for the Android and WebOS
platforms in 2009. Android support is now projected for mid-2010. Since 2007
Apple has released 3 major versions of their iPhone OS, Google has announced,
developed, and released a SmartPhone OS with 2 major revisions. Apple
developed, announced, and will release the iPad before Adobe ships a modern
mobile Flash for a large variety of devices. Linux & OSX support for Flash on
the desktop is still subpar. If you think Flash is good or bad there are
serious questions here about Adobe's ability to simply support this platform
that is so widely relied on by developers.

~~~
olefoo
Precisely. Not to mention the wonderful little easter egg that is flash-
cookies which the user has no control over or visibility into. Adobe has let
most of it's constituencies down.

~~~
DavidSJ
I didn't know about flash cookies. That's a mini scandal.

Here's Adobe's terrible UI for viewing and deleting your Flash cookies:
[http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...](http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html)

~~~
KWD
That's actually bookmarked as the first item in my Firefox toolbar. Use it
regularly, though also using the Better Privacy FF add-on. .

------
joezydeco
Here's something that came to mind reading this: When the iPhone was announced
(and once again when the SDK was announced) there was a fair amount of teeth
gnashing and whining about Java not being supported.

Haven't heard one peep about Java on iPad this time around. Will Flash suffer
the same fate?

~~~
holman
The Java-on-the-iPhone critics were less numerous from the start (or at least
were not as vocal). But you're right, though; I think it's easier now to
wonder if Java would offer anything compelling to the iPhone platform anyway
(other than offering another way to run your own code, which is a different
discussion entirely).

As to your second question: Java is a fundamentally important language in its
own right (the enterprise angle); its success was never really tied to the
availability of client-side runtimes. Flash doesn't quite have that same
luxury.

~~~
joezydeco
I'm kind of second-guessing my thought as well. In the early days (well, the
first year, really) of the iPhone Apple was steadfast in their idea that
everything would be web-based. No SDK needed.

The concern over Java at _that_ point was if it was going to be allowed on the
phone at all. JME/J2ME was what the mobile industry was trending toward. The
success of Cocoa Touch and the App Store has pretty much made J2ME a footnote
(except for the few carriers still hanging on).

~~~
GHFigs
_Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based._

Is there an actual quote to back this up? I was paying close attention back in
the "shit sandwich" days and I don't recall this "steadfast" insistence being
actually stated by anyone from Apple. What I do remember was just a big
disappointment at the time and Apple's usual silence on future plans. And the
web SDK they did offer did actually end up getting used widely, as Gruber
mentions in this article.

I'm not trying to argue, I just see this idea that Apple never planned a
native SDK is repeated so often and yet it doesn't fly with what I remember.

~~~
joezydeco
I totally understand. In the flurry of it all we've all forgotten what you
remembered: Apple never said anything to the point of "No SDK. Ever."

Aside from Jobs' WWDC 2007 address there were rumors and signals that "web was
all you're gonna get"[1][2], but obviously they planned an SDK that eventually
was announced 9 months after the reveal. Or developer pressure convinced the
staff to polish the internal tools and APIs for public use? I'm kind of sad
that with the new secretive Apple, we'll never know the full story behind the
scenes for a long long time to come.

[1] [http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-
covera...](http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-coverage/)

[2] [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-
sdk-...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-will-
remain-web-based-for-the-foreseeable-future.ars)

------
benologist
A screenshot showing aviary working because they made a quicktime video
alternate? Aviary's whole platform is a stunning example of how awesome Flash
really can be, it's a suite of cutting edge design tools done in Flash and
they haven't ported _those_ to the iPhone - check them out if you want, their
apps are just amazing: <http://www.aviary.com>

The 'games' they mention are not what TFB is showing either. Addicting Games
(owned by MTV) is a casual game site with somewhere around a million daily
visitors and 1000s of games you can just click to play, not apps you need to
find, maybe buy, download and install.

Even if that process is streamlined it doesn't scale to the extent Flash game
sites do where at any time your investment in any game is just a click and
countless other games are also just a click away.

~~~
necubi
But the vast majority of flash games are useless on the iPhone and iPad,
because they expect input mechanisms that those devices don't have. Though
there's probably less variety, native games clearly provide a better
experience because they are designed for the hardware.

~~~
glhaynes
Yes! It's extraordinary to me how much people forget this. Flash would be nice
on the iPhone OS devices for movies, but a huge percentage of the games would
be unplayable. No wonder Apple isn't interested.

------
GeoJawDguJin
The Hulu developers didn't pick Flash because it was "easy." They picked it
because it allowed them to retain a high degree of control over their
streaming video content -- control they would lose if they exposed an h.264
stream to an iPhone or iPad client.

I think it could be five years or more before anyone watches Hulu or Netflix
on any of these devices.

~~~
catch23
No, I think the hulu developers picked flash because that's where the users
are. They could have chosen java, or silverlight, but they chose flash for the
same reason most sites choose flash. I'm sure if Hulu wanted to, they could
develop a native app, just like the YouTube native app, for the iPhone, but my
guess is that it wasn't part of their strategy initially.

If netflix wants the iPad users, they would develop their own native app and
ship it just like the other dozens of apps out there. In fact, it would give
Hulu & Netflix greater control over their users with a native app. Hulu has
already developed a desktop app, why wouldn't they develop a native app for
the iPhone?

Remember back in the IE4 & IE5 days? Lots of companies developed native
ActiveX components that could be embedded into webpages because most users
used IE4. I'm actually quite happy that Apple is forcing web companies out
there to rethink open platforms. There's quite a few demos that show how
powerful javascript & canvas can be already. It would be nice if we could
replace the majority of flash apps with javascript, canvas, and webgl.

~~~
KC8ZKF
If Hulu or Netflix (which uses Silverlight) were to make a native application
for iPad would Apple approve it? I don't know. Neither Hulu or Netflix could
make an application without approval of both Apple and their content
providers.

------
callmeed
Our company's bread and butter are Flash-based portfolio sites (and a good
amount of bread, I might add).

But I don't want Flash on the iPhone OS. I remember looking at one of our
sites on my old Dell Axim—it sucked.

I'm already working on new, non-Flash offerings and they're going to sell well
(I think). I can do almost everything my clients want now w/o Flash—once HTML
5 is fully supported, everything.

Like Gruber said, I don't care about Adobe, I care about me and my clients.

------
halo
There's always the status quo - that the majority of content producers will
simply continue to make content using Flash that the iPhone and iPad can't
access, and users mostly live with it with the occasional grumble, while the
bigger providers will largely create dedicated applications to work-around the
issue (and that isn't going to kill Flash).

Let's get some perspective here. The iPhone currently represents around 0.45%
of all web browsing (citation:
[http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/net_applicatio...](http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/net_applications_mac_os_x_sees_market_share_dips_in_december_iphone_safari_/)).
The iPhone's dent in Flash's market share represents _at most_ a drop from 99%
to 98%. For the iPhone and iPad to get the marketshare of _Opera_ , this usage
would need to triple. Would you radically redesign how your site works for
Opera users? Developers do follow what their users have, but little has
changed and users still have Flash.

To make matters worse, there's no drop-in replacement. For the most common
use-case of audio and video, we're in standards hell -- Firefox and Internet
Explorer make up over 80% of web browsers on the Internet between them, and
Mozilla aren't going to support the H.264 video tag and Microsoft are unlikely
to support it in IE either. And in many other cases, websites are using Flash
to do things they simply can't do in HTML (or even HTML5), whether DRM,
streaming video, or something vastly more complicated.

------
grayrest
What I think every time I see the blue boxes screenshots:

<http://gr.ayre.st/s/images/go_flash.png>

~~~
ajkirwin
I have never, never, EVER had flash crash. Nor has anyone else I know. But
then, they all use PCs..

~~~
tumult
It's always easy to spot people who make a living programming solely in Flash.
It's kind of an interesting phenomenon -- people will suddenly, and vocally,
speak up in support of Flash with outlandish claims.

~~~
alex_c
I'm not sure who's making the outlandish claims here.

I haven't programmed Flash in my life, but I can't say I've had Flash crash on
me more often than, say, once a few months. Definitely not often enough that I
notice it as a major annoyance, on either Mac or Windows.

Now, Flash is annoying for other reasons, but crashing isn't one -- for me.

~~~
tumult
For me, Flash crashes multiple times every day in OS X 10.5. Clicktoflash is a
godsend for Safari stability without plugin process separation.

(offer an anecdote, receive an anecdote.)

~~~
alex_c
Anecdotes are fine. It's extrapolating to "It's always easy to spot people who
make a living programming solely in Flash" that I'm taking an issue with.

~~~
tumult
Then you should have said that when you replied, not state that it wasn't an
outlandish claim.

------
Niten
As uneasy as I am about what the iPad might say about the future of personal
computing, if it can deliver the death blow to Adobe Flash then I'm all for
it.

However, I do have my doubts. This article compares the iPad's Flash problems
to Firefox's early problems with sites that were designed specifically for IE,
but that's really an apples-to-oranges (Apples to Orange Foxes?) comparison.
Firefox succeeded despite early incompatibilities because it targeted power
users--the kinds of folks who can live with recurrent web browsing glitches,
who can recognize broken sites and don't mind alt-tabbing back to IE where
necessary.

But the iPad's target demographic isn't the power user, it's the technological
neophyte. iPad users may be less tolerant of things not "just working", and
the iPad may therefore have a harder time of bridging that incompatibility gap
than Firefox did.

(And while Firefox users always had the option to fall back to IE--using
Firefox and using IE were not mutually exclusive choices--what's the fallback
option for iPad users when the content they want is only available with Flash?
Carry a laptop with them, too?)

~~~
wtallis
The lack of a fallback does seem to be the biggest issue. On the iPhone, it
doesn't really matter, since none of the flash-based UIs would be usable on it
anyways, so a separate version would still need to be developed. The iPad can
afford somewhat PC-like interaction, so sites like Hulu could work if there
was a flash plugin.

What reassures me that Flash is on it's way down is the way web technologies
have advanced and been adopted despite IE's dominance and Microsoft's
reluctance to properly implement CSS and other newer web features. When
Firefox hit the scene, IE was far more dominant than Flash is now, and yet it
managed to fight its way into the mainstream. Web sites are now written to
follow the standards everywhere that it's convenient, and CSS and JS hacks are
used to make it work in IE.

Sure, iPad users won't be as forgiving of broken sites as Firefox early
adopters were, but their collective voice will be far more influential than
the small band of rebels that broke the IE monopoly.

------
mixmax
Gruber is right. I checked my site's stats, and to my surprise 8,4% of my
visitors don't support flash.

~~~
edd
Lots of other people on twitter are also checking their flash stats. You can
see the results here: <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shareyourflashstats>

I would be intrigued to see some big players announce their stats also but
anyone of any size usually keeps stats close to their chests.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It would be interesting to see what the Flash stats for news.ycombinator.com
are.

------
mark_h
My favourite bit, regarding the infamous blue-boxes poster:

 _Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-
optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as
straight-up H.264._

------
friism
Don't forget Gordon, the open source Flash runtime implemented in Javascript
and HTML5: <http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon>

I don't think something like this will save Adobe's derriere though -- at best
it'll be a fallback-option developers can use if they must include Falsh
content.

~~~
pyre
It doesn't provide everything that flash does, and IIRC only supports flash
animations. Some things that flash provides that JavaScript (at least JS
provided by the server) can't provide: Webcam and microphone access (think
sites like ustream and stickam), exact font control (there was a demo site a
while back that showed the same site rendered on different browsers to
demonstrate how much even the placement of fonts differed), etc.

I'm no proponent of Flash, but to say that Gordon can completely replace Flash
is not the truth.

------
csmeder
I'm liking John Gruber's posts more and more. Besides Paul Graham he might be
favorite essayist right now.

------
olalonde
I'm all for seeing Flash die a slow death. However, I wouldn't celebrate Apple
for making the web more open: their AppStore is the worst proprietary/closed
platform out there.

