
Ask HN: Does the iPhone still need Flash support? - grinich
Does the iPhone still need Flash support?
======
cpr
The iPhone never did need Flash support.

Flash is used for delivering ads (no thanks) and video (already covered by
special-casing sites like YouTube). Flash is used for silly game sites, and
we've got enough games on the iPhone (thank you very much (said by someone who
has a non-game app (<http://grafly.com>) that's drowned out by all the game
"noise" on the App Store ;-)).

Flash is the proprietary web, undiscoverable, unsearchable.

Flash is owned by entirely by Adobe, who make no bones about trying to build
an entirely separate world in Flash to attempt to dominate the web and the
desktop (AIR).

No thanks.

Edit: And, as antirez has pointed out, HTML5+JS+CSS are working hard to
obviate Flash. With Google and Apple and Mozilla on their side, I think they
have a good chance.

~~~
lsd5you
Apparently iPhone apps are undiscoverable as well... or so your comment
implies.

Then special casing is not ideal and i'm fairly sure flash does get indexed
these days.

Its apparent you don't want it, but does the iPhone need Flash? I don't know -
i don't have one, but i would think its only a matter of time.

~~~
antirez
with HTML5 going forward the "flash is needed for videos" idea is going to
vanish...

~~~
JunkDNA
Not only is the "flash is needed for videos" idea going to vanish. The impact
of the relentless improvements being made to the JS engines in Firefox,
Safari, and Chrome are hard to over state. At some point, the combination of
HTML5 and high performance JS starts to make me wonder how many other current
applications of flash are doomed as well. It won't happen overnight, but I
think the writing is certainly on the wall.

~~~
falava
The JS improvements in Firefox its called Tamarin tracing and comes from the
Flash engine, donated by Adobe, so they also want a fast js in the browser:

<http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/>

Adobe was also a big proponent of SVG standard (for vectorial graphics) with
their very own plugin, until they purchased Macromedia.

Because Macromedia did a incredible, really great job pushing their plugin
into the vast majority of browsers (google flash plugin penetration ~ 99%).
They accomplished that by making a tool that web developers wanted and people
liked, with a smaller plugin and better than any other company: fast
animations (remember the pain of making gif89a or a java applet?), mp3 sounds!
(remember midi, wav, au, aiff or the BGSOUND tag?), typography, any font! (not
just Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Times or Georgia), vector graphics that
downloads and renders fast (is there any website using SVG now?), streaming
video embeded into the html page (better than real player, quicktime or
windows media, because it works almost for everybody, except the iPhone users,
except when watching YouTube), microphone and webcam support, and now (with
flash 10) they are putting 3d inside their plugin (before anyone could say
OpenGL ES).

In an ideal world we would have solid standards, but in this world we have the
W3C, and the abandoned XHTML2 or CSS3, unimplemented by the browsers CSS2,
SVG, SMIL, and so on...

That is why we have got the propietary Futuresplash-Macromedia-Adobe Flash
leading the web to its full potencial, in place of the W3C, or Sun's Java
applets, Microsoft's ActiveX or Silverlight, Adobe PDF+scripts, Google
nativeclient... but Macromedia did better.

~~~
bobidden
Wikipedia has a lot of charts and such as SVGs. But I've never seen it
anywhere else.

------
geuis
I don't think rehashing the flash argument in terms of "it's a proprietary
technology" is necessary. I'm writing this comment from my iPhone. I can't
remember any time in the last 2 years I have needed Flash on this thing for
something mission critical. If anything, I am annoyed by the numerous warnings
from various sites that make popup alerts saying I need it. The only time it
was annoying not to have it was trying to read various links here on HN that
were from scribd. Now they have iPhone friendly versions of their documents
and that grievance is gone.

So no, the iPhone doesn't need flash and I would disable it even were it
available.

------
antirez
What I love of the iPhone not supporting it (and in one year of using the
iPhone every day I never needed flash) is that it is a good argument against
flash, to be used with people not understanding the other, more sensible,
arguments against flash. So: _We can't use flash! Otherwise we have a problem
with iPhone users_.

~~~
nailer
Personally, I've had a phone for two years, and ran into non-youtube video
quite frequently.

~~~
antirez
Yep it happens, but most videos are also viewable searching for the title into
Youtube. And as I said I really hope that HTML5 will remove this last
problem... The only left problem is P0RN of course... but there is
<http://pornhub.com> that is iPhone ready.

------
callmeed
As someone whose business primarily consists of Flash-based web sites and
development, I was initially disappointed by the initial lack of Flash support
and subsequent delays.

Now, I couldn't care less. In fact, I'd probably prefer the iPhone didn't have
Flash support. For what we do at least, rendering Flash on the iPhone would be
a usability nightmare. It's not hard to detect a visitor using an iPhone and
render a much friendlier version.

~~~
nailer
I think you mean 'could not care less'.

~~~
callmeed
Yes, of course ... edited

------
poppysan
I think users would love to have the option to access millions more
apps/sites/content.

Flash is indeed searchable, and indexed since flashplayer 9.

------
mgenzel
It's not about whether Flash is good or bad; or whether at some point in the
future it's going to be outmoded. It's about the _fact_ that there are plenty
of websites out there that do use Flash right now, and it would be, I don't
know, kind of nice to be able to use them.

------
illumen
Apple has many competitive products to Adobe. Of course they're not going to
try and help Adobe.

It's also why they aren't supporting an open video tag. They have competitive
products to it.

------
radley
Of course it does. There's a ton of apps and services built upon the Flash
framework.

But hey. Flash is bad. Rarr. Objective-C good. Woot.

~~~
allenbrunson
it's not that flash is bad per se, but rather adobe's stewardship of it.
they're doing their best to create another microsoft-like monopoly around it.

and it can't help that the flash plugin on macs has always been abysmal. it
uses way too much cpu time. any flash website i go to makes the fans spin on
my older powerbook. hardly surprising, then, that the powers that be at apple
are not too crazy about it. in fact, flash pretty much sucks on _all_
platforms except windows.

------
jemmons
No.

