Dan Cohen reports for Gear Diary, “I went to watch something on my iPhone earlier and couldn’t. Turns out it was flash and, as you likely know, the iPhone doesn’t support flash. That’s nothing new. What was new, at least to me, was the way the screen presented the message about Flash not working.”
“In the past I had gotten messages like- ‘To view this content upgrade your browser and flash plug-in,'” Cohen reports.
Now the message reads:
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Flash is a putrid, bloated mess seemingly created to heat up CPUs, run down batteries, and crash browsers. There are far better and way more efficient ways to deliver video and interactive content (QuickTime, HTML 5) than to use Adobe’s horrid Flash. For a company that owes its very existence to Apple, Adobe has gotten quite brave peddling their bloated myriad suites to Windows PC sufferers. We hope Apple never allows Flash to blight iPhone OS devices; it’s bad enough we have to deal with it in our Mac browsers.
Back in January 2007, six months before iPhone’s release, The New York Times’ John Markoff interviewed Apple CEO Steve Jobs who said in reply to a Flash on iPhone question, “You don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using H.264 instead of the old codec.”
Apple subsequently did just that as YouTube moved to superior H.264 encoding. iPhone does not need Adobe’s Flash bloatware. That much is obvious; just look at the sales figures along with the beautiful video and 100,000+ apps that have been delivered without once having to cripple iPhone with Adobe’s Flash garbage. Adobe is simply being further marginalized and there’s nothing they can do about it, beyond delivering terse, whiny messages to users that blame Apple. Why don’t they get to work on making an efficient mobile version of Flash instead of designing mobile Web pages blaming others for their own ineptitude? Because they know their proprietary Flash mess will never be able to compete with HTML 5 and H.264, that’s why.
Oh, by the way, we can deliver messages, too:
• To Web designers and those who hire them: If you want to exclude tens of millions of potential customers who have significantly more discretionary income at their disposal than average, by all means build your sites using Flash. If you prefer to reach tens of millions of well-heeled customers, you’ll want steer completely clear of Adobe’s Flash.
• To Mac users looking into photo-editing apps: Before you waste your money on Adobe’s Photoshop Elements, give the 30-day free trial of Pixelmator a try. We bet you’ll like what you see.
Please MDN, don’t hold back…
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We don’t want no stinkin’ flash – Adobe!
You go MDN!
Adobe is a mud hut.
it doesn’t help when you are out and about and CAN NOT SEE a site you might happen to need to.
i understand flash sucks- but the rest of the world is on it and we should have the choice to momentarily run our battery down so we can see .. say a site for a restaurant.
All that said, it’s really only on the OS X platform that Flash sucks. Sadly, lowly netbooks with XP seem to run Flash smoothly without whirring up fans full blast. I think it may be a two-way street here.
Speaking of not wasting a bunch of money on Adobe products, I am on the cusp of purchasing Dreamweaver CS4. Is there a better, more affordable choice that isn’t a product of those miserable, ungrateful wretches?
MESSAGE TO APPLE: KEEP FLASH OFF MY IPHONE..!
Got that Adobe?
All the files and garbage you pile into my computer using your trashy software makes me want to put Photoshop in the bin too.. (Already binned InDesign, Macromedia, Acrobat – Photoshop is the last..)
I loaded ClicktoFlash onto my Macs a month ago. What a breath of fresh air. Faster web browsing because Flash crap isn’t being loaded for every web page. And as Ottawa Mark noted, you will be amazed at how many freakin’ flash boxes are on a typical web page.
I agree basically. I do not think Flash is relevant anymore. It was a stop gap to provide animation to websites. The web will move forward and Flash’s role will become smaller and smaller.
Web designers using Flash need to make non-Flash versions of the websites ASAP or lose traffic from iPhone users. By the way, many other mobile devices can not play Flash content or can only play it in a limited way.
I think Flash, overall, will start to disappear as designers get the message that the public wants to read content and get to the content, and are no longer as impressed with some Flash animations.
Sorry, Adobe – but you need to keep innovating as you go forward.
Adobe is a natural building material made from sand, clay, and water, with some kind of fibrous or organic material (sticks, straw, dung),
With emphasis on the “DUNG”.
Everybody always says that flash runs like shit on a Mac. Seems okay to me. What is the problem exactly? I’ve never seen it big down Safari. Not that I like flash at all – just wondering. I installed clicktoflash but disabled it cuz I got tired of seeing all the grey ad boxes on every website.
NEED A CANVAS HTML5 APP EDITOR PLEEEEZE!
To everyone who might need flash in a pinch but hates it in general because it slows their computers and browsing to a crawl:
Do yourselves a huge favor:
Try ClicktoFlash ( It’s FREE) NOW !!!
Get ClicktoFlash ( It’s FREE) NOW !!!
Try ClicktoFlash ( It’s FREE) NOW !!!
Get ClicktoFlash ( It’s FREE) NOW !!!
Try ClicktoFlash ( It’s FREE) NOW !!!
Get ClicktoFlash ( It’s FREE) NOW !!!
84 Mac Guy
MDN has mobile version of the site. No flash on that.
84 Mac Guy:
MDN does NOT control what type of content its advertisers provide. As we all know, because anyone can very easily, without any effort, block image loading, advertisers are using Flash banners to deliver their stuff. Click2Flash is a nice solution, but very, very few people actually use it. This is why Flash is the delivery format of choice for ads.
My only hassles with my Macs involve Adobe software: Dreamweaver crashes on exit; Photoshop crashes in use; Flash slows things to a crawl. All pile junk in my machines. And there never seem to be any updates to fix known problems that have existed for months, if not years, especially with Photoshop. Pixelmator is a fine substitute and we probably will not buy another upgrade of Photoshop. Sometimes I think Adobe and Intuit (Quicken) are paid off by PC manufacturers NOT to develop a viable product for Mac.
More t han 95% of the existing Flash content on the web could easily be delivered using HTML5 and AJAX technologies (look at Google’s properties; no Flash in sight, anywhere, except YouTube).
Flash’s main advantage is the ability for non-developers (i.e. graphic designers and animators) to use GUI tools to quickly whip up animated, interactive web content. This alone is what propelled Flash to where it is, and this will keep Adobe complacent as king of the hill for delivery of interactive web content.
Unless someone develops an authoring tool for building animated, interactive content in HTML5/AJAX with equivalent level of intuitiveness as Flash, we won’t see Adobe get off its massive ass and do some optimisation of Flash run-time engine.
@James T., an alternative to Dreamweaver CS4? Try Dreamweaver CS3 if you haven’t got that already and can find it online. I ran the CS4 trial earlier this year and it was slow as molasses and crashed frequently, then bought a CS3 upgrade package in August (from techforless.com, though it looks like they’re out now) and it runs much faster than CS4 and with no crashes so far. CSS rendering is great, too, which was my big concern.
(MW respect–freaky)
As for Adobe products in general, I’ve used ’em for years and used to love them, but the more recent versions are definitely getting buggier and sloppier as the company tried to build a “platform” and custom user interface instead of focusing on the quality and stability of their individual apps. I won’t be upgrading my CS2 versions of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator anytime in the near future, and will definitely look at alternatives when the time comes, and the same goes for Dreamweaver CS3.
Nonsense.
Flash video players will perfectly play h.264/aac (=.m4v) movies without a problem and without taxing the CPU.
The HTML5 Video element will also play .FLV files in Safari.
I don’t need flash or any adobe products.
Far too many websites use Flash so its is a pain in the a$$ at times not to have it. Not a fan of Adobe, but the iPhone can handle it. Apple let it on.
Flash is better than you think. I’m a programmer and I have developed websites that work on all browsers and all operating systems without problems. I’ve also tried that with HTML and HTML 5 is not a ratified standard as of yet. Although I am an Apple fan, Apple is foolish to forge ahead with HTML 5. HTML has been a standard for years and the standards bodies only bicker and no browsers are ever completely compliant. The “Standards experiment” so far has not worked very well.
If Apple thinks they can just say “Fine, we’ll support HTML 5 in our browser Safari so it works great on Macs, iPhone and Windows provided you use our browser, than they are no better than what we all hated about Microsoft
Flash is a resource-hogging ball and chain.
Dreamweaver is entirely unintuitive until you figure it out and
is priced for professional write-offs, not the consumer.
Freehand is under the thumb and won’t be allowed for open souce.
Photoshop is feature stagnant to justify any upgrade pricing, and why should any consumer use it when they can use the constantly upgraded Pixelmator.
Adobe got the big head and forgot they are still an app company, not a platform.
Adobe has done nothing revolutionary or evolutionary in a long, long time.
Adobe made some good business moves to get power and control, but has done nothing with it that helps the average consumer.