Re:No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM
by tesseract on Wednesday January 19, 2011 @10:29PM
(#2122518)
I'm guessing your experience with Flash on the desktop is on Windows? I've never had significant problems with it there. On the other hand, my experience is that on a Mac (or worse, Linux), Flash is slow, crash-prone, a major CPU and RAM hog, tends to steal keyboard and/or mouse focus in weird ways when you least expect it, and just generally does not provide a very nice user experience.
This has nothing to do with Apple "crippling" Flash or anything like that either; if anything, Adobe has been improving the Mac version of Flash since before Apple started publicly ragging on it. They've still got quite a ways to go though.
The bottom line is that while a subpar technology, Flash is really not that crappy. It delivers rich content without any glitches to millions of desktops every day and while its implementation on phones is still not great, there is no technical reason why it won't improve to the same level we see on the desktops.
Here is why Flash is not going anywhere: the anger against it is not strong enough nor shared by enough users. Most web surfers are pretty happy about it, and as long as that doesn't change, Flash won't die.