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History is repeating itself: Apple’s single-button, oversized iPhone dubbed the iPad doesn’t run Flash, just like its tinier counterpart doesn’t. Although the official documentation and marketing collateral avoids mentioning Flash entirely, all checks indicate that the device is incapable of rendering Flash-authored web content. And yes – it’s a design feature rather than an engineering omission.
When Steve Jobs sat on a couch on the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts stage to demo web browsing on the iPad, journalists attending the show were taken aback how fast the device responds to Jobs’ fingers travelling across the iPad’s full capacitive 9.7-inch multitouch display. Apple’s chief was swiping around web pages and zooming in with ease – just like on the iPhone, only way faster. The journalists who have seen it all watched amazed as the device took Jobs through familiar sites like Fandango and Apple.com with the speed of a notebook. But when the CEO clicked a story on the NYTimes.com homepage, a missing plug-in message spoiled Jobs’ presentation for a moment but he quickly navigated away and moved on to the next keynote segment.
Three years ago, the crowd attending the January 2007 Macworld keynote had experienced a similar moment during the first public introduction of the original iPhone. Just like today, the audience had gasped at the time when a sleek mobile phone in Jobs’ hands rendered the complete NYTimes.com homepage. Only a few had noticed a small missing plug-in rectangle in place of a Flash content on the NYTimes.com homepage. When the iPhone hit the stores six months later, the tech press spelled doom for the handset that couldn’t properly display Flash sites.
The iPad shows that Apple’s clear dislike of Flash technology hasn’t diminished over time. The updated iPhone OS 3.2 SDK and marketing materials on Apple’s iPad site avoid mentioning Flash entirely. As you know, Apple prefers owning key technologies that go into its products. This way, the company has only itself to blame if it screws up a product. A proprietary technology built using non-Apple frameworks, Flash is a big no-no on all iPhone OS-based devices, like the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
NO FLASH ON THE IPAD A rare few had noticed a missing plugin icon on the NYTimes.com homepage, shown here at Jobs’ iPhone introduction January 2007. When he took the stage three years later to launch the tablet, the same missing plugin icon appeared on NYTimes.com.
That doesn’t have to be such a bad thing, though. There’s no reason to fear that the iPad won’t let you watch embedded YouTube videos. Like on the iPhone, the iPad’s mobile Safari will automatically launch such videos in the YouTube app when you tap them. It’s not a perfect solution, although the iPad’s custom-engineered 1GHz A4 processor should switch between Safari and YouTube apps very quickly.
It’s not just Apple, the web at large has been moving away from proprietary technologies like Flash in favor of web standards like HTML5. Even the Flash-built Vimeo and YouTube are prepping to abandon Adobe’s technology – YouTube is currently beta testing a HTML5 video player that bypasses the Flash plugin entirely (and Vimeo, too).
Looking at the bigger picture, content wants to be free. Video and audio content encoded using proprietary codes should have no business on the open web. Those technologies have been stalling innovation for years. With HTML5-compliant browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox now in full view, those QuickTime trailers, Flash videos, and Windows Media clips found online will be replaced with the content injected into web pages using <video> and <audio> HTML5 tags. With that in mind, the fact that the iPad doesn’t support Flash shouldn’t mean the end of the world. Make sense?
