Adobe kills Flash on mobiles

[Sysman]

Who'd a thunk it given their replies to Apple's criticisms?

Exclusive: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

Update From the horse's mouth

[Spacecadet]

http://forums.contractoruk.com/gener...ast-laugh.html

I would add KUATB but this is a technical topic and you had the grace to post in the technical forum!

[Sysman]

KUATB - ScooterScot beat me to it in General.

Still, Technical is a better place for this, since I believe some folks here have an investment in it.

[Sysman]

As a follow on, teh future of Silverlight?

Will there be a Silverlight 6 (and does it matter)?

Microsoft is poised to release to manufacturing Silverlight 5. There’s word from some of my contacts that this might be the last major release of Silverlight, but Microsoft isn’t confirming or denying.

[d000hg]

A question - is HTML5 in active development or is it a fixed set of things? Flash/SL have always been under continual development, whereas JS hasn't changed for ages (?) and if HTML5 is a fixed spec, isn't that going to limit progress? After all even C++ and Java evolve...

[Sysman]

According to the HTML5 Wiki entry it is still under active development, but just as it was preceded by versions 1 to 4, HTML5 will probably not be the end of the line.

[d000hg]

Yeah but HTML4 was around for what, a decade?

[NickFitz]

A question - is HTML5 in active development or is it a fixed set of things? Flash/SL have always been under continual development, whereas JS hasn't changed for ages (?) and if HTML5 is a fixed spec, isn't that going to limit progress? After all even C++ and Java evolve...

HTML5 is constantly evolving; the WHAT-WG branch of the development effort no longer even call it 5, having deemed that it will just keep on evolving for ever, or something.

JavaScript has developed a lot; even Microsoft are involved in that. IE9 incorporates a lot of stuff from ECMAScript 5 (which is the official name, "JavaScript" being a trademark of Sun Microsystems and therefore now of Oracle, which was licensed to Netscape, and via that route to Mozilla). ECMAScript 5 compatibility table gives a lot of details.

JS has also evolved in terms of the techniques used by implementations, with a variety of approaches being used to provide JITted execution without sacrificing the dynamic nature of the language; hence constant benchmark battles between the different vendors. This IE team blog post is fairly typical: The New JavaScript Engine in Internet Explorer 9; a little Googling will quickly find similar posts from the Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla browser dev teams.

[Sysman]

Did anyone else get into Flash update hell yesterday or today?

One XP system here kept downloading the blighter and failing to install, even though according to the Control Panel it had the latest one already installed.

The sooner it dies the better, and if it weren't for YouTube I'd be quite happy without it.

[VectraMan]

HTML5 won't be a standard for a couple of years yet, and even then the issue of video remains undefined. Even then, no doubt the browser writers will still be knocking out proprietary features, and then waiting for the standards bodies to catch up. Whatever you think of Flash, it's probably the only technology that's come closest to the write once run anywhere goal, precisely because it's one company that's developed it.

As for Javascript, Macromedia added proper classes and type checking to Javascript, but in a clever way that allowed it to remain backwards compatible and keep the advantages of dynamic types. The standards people based ECMAScript 4 on the same thing, and for a while things looked really good: a proper modern secure object-oriented language to rival Java or C#, but built into the browser. But then they rejected the whole thing and decided that Javascript should be a language with little more technical sophistication than ZX BASIC.

All this could turn out to be a case of "be careful what you wish for".

And Adobe haven't killed Flash on mobiles. They've said they're not going to develop it further, and as further development of Flash is towards high-end gaming, that's not surprising. Flash as it is will continue to work, and continue to be supported on everything that does it now, and presumably as the technology exists for Android and Windows Mobile, new devices will continue to support it too.