By now you probably have heard about this little tussle between Apple and Adobe. The fight became “public” when Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted an open letter of sorts about his Thoughts on Flash where he criticized one of Adobe’s flagship products – Flash. Our good friend Steve said some unfriendly things against Flash, it being not secure enough, not touch-friendly enough, not technology forward enough and most of all, not open enough. So, enough is enough. Flash can’t get anywhere near Apple’s mobile devices. Whew!
Many people might not agree with Apple’s position. After all, more than 90% of all websites on the Internet have some Flash in them. Some even run almost entirely on Flash like HBO.com that if you try to visit the site and your computer doesn’t support Flash, you’ll see an almost blank page except for a line that says: You need to install Flash. Surely, if that much websites use Flash, it couldn’t be that bad, right?
Wrong! At least in Apple’s point of view. For Apple, Flash has no place in today’s mobile computing devices so they blocked Flash on iPhone, iPod and iPad. That means, if you recently bought an iPad, you now have in your hand ‘the best way to see the web, email and photos’, except that you can’t play Farmville, you won’t enjoy HBO.com and you will see some missing elements on CNN.com, Disney.com and millions of other websites running Flash. Huh?