November 09, 2011
Adobe abandons Flash for mobile web browsers
If you hope to offer a good mobile web experience, it may be time to ditch the Flash on your site. Today Adobe announced that it’s stopping development on the Flash Player for mobile browsers. The company is refocusing on HTML5 for mobile delivery…
Many news sites use Flash to deliver features such as audio slideshows (especially via the popular tool Soundslides), data visualizations, video, interactivity—and ads.
Apple has never supported Flash on the iPhone and iPad, so apps and web content offerings developed specifically for the iOS operating system won’t be affected. However, Flash is often used in offerings for the Android mobile operating system.
This is also a concern if you use Flash on the full version of your site, which is intended to be displayed on a computer screen. That’s because many news sites either don’t have a mobile web theme, or don’t default to it for mobile visitors. Also, many smartphone and tablet users prefer to see the full site on their device—even though this may require a fair amount of zooming and scrolling to navigate.
Adobe VP Danny Winokur wrote:
“HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.”
UPDATE: Nieman Journalism Lab has more details about how this shift will affect news sites. They note:
“One thing certain to draw an advertiser’s ire is the knowledge that his ads aren’t being shown to potential customers, and ads are the most prominent use of Flash on most news sites. Most publishers, though, have been smart enough to deal with this upfront with advertisers, having policies like this one from The Boston Globe requiring a fallback image that can be served to readers who don’t have Flash installed.“The biggest driver here is news sites’ creation of mobile-optimized websites, which take different ad units than do desktop/laptop sites, and for which no right-thinking ad salesperson has ever allowed Flash ads. Apple’s iAds were an early force for using HTML5 to build an immersive, rich-media, Flash-like experience for mobile ads, but it’s limited to in-app ads and has generally been viewed as something less than a roaring success.”
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Comments
Flash has been criticized for being an intense resource hog. Many are confused by the fact that Android will be supporting Flash, given that Flash has announced that it will no longer be developing or supporting Flash Mobile. Mobile Flash support, however, will be involved on all Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system devices. The full article can be found at: http://www.appisaurus.com/923-ice-cream-sandwich-flash/.
By NomerD, 11/23/11 at 7:29 pm
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