Once again Flash is in trouble. It’s not the first time, and I believe it’s still not the last. From Javascript, AJAX, Silverlight, Google, Microsoft… you name them, they’ve probably had some thorn in Flash’s side.

Now it’s piling up for Flash again: Steve Jobs is crusading against Flash accompanied by the entire HTML5 consortium. Atop of this all major video-service providers, mobile phone makers, and a whole lot of others are now leaving Flash behind in the dust.

Once so close to web domination with virtually cross OS and cross browser support, Flash has bailed me out of many a worry of making things work in all browsers (remember IE6 anyone). Flash’s biggest blow may have been when they couldn’t make their player a web standard and include it in the DOM (as a seemless part of every browser).

Here we are stepping right in the core of the problems; Flash is run in a plugin… A “browser” inside a browser, so to speak. A semi-propritary technology is not wise to include in any standards. So that leaves us all to download a plugin in order to run the Flash content. We don’t really like this, but most of us are willing to forgive this if the content is worth it, and it suprisingly often is (IMHO).

Part of Flash’s problem is how easy things are to create. Everybody can make something in Flash, there are grandmothers making things in Flash! However when it comes down to dynamic applications using webservices, remoting and object orientated code libraries many fall off the wagon and start improvising. Uh-oh. This is where you shouldn’t improvise at all, and all over the web your bombarded with error-messages and applications stopping working.

Would you let your local baker do brainsurgery on yourself, or leave your car at the hot-dog-cart for a full haul-over. Not likely. But it’s OK for your web-shop to be designed by a developer and developed by a designer? Lets face it, it’s the perfect combination: A developer needs only two hours to “design” any solution, and the designer needs only a day “to make it work”. So good times then, or shouldn’t someone start raising the red flag here?
This scenario is unfortunately a not uncommon in the world of Flash as “everybody” can do “everything”. However, there’s more and more Flash-projects being done more correctly now adays as Adobe has created a more intuitive work-flow.

Flash is pinpointed for the web. The web have never had any unified organisation going through all webpages and flashs approving them for the web, like Apple does for their platforms. This means that a lot of crap-application and banners etc are loaded on overy page out there. No wonder people are eager to kill Flash.

Of course there’s also a lot of technical issues with flash making people dislike it. Like it doesn’t support touch-screens, it lacks abilities for SEO and WAI (Search engines and accessibility), it’s CPU-heavy, device-problems and a lot of other things.
All of these technicalities I believe Adobe must pay attention to in order to keep the Flash platform alive. It really shouldn’t be that difficult. Adobe should do one more thing, maybe more important than the technical issues, they need to rethink the philosophy behind Flash and where to go with it. Maybe not so easy to foresee the iPhone, but now that iPhone has been around for a long time, Adobe has not really adopted to it, but rather started a defensive verbal argument.

So will Flash die a slow painful death now? Of course it’s a time for everything. One day Flash will be history, as will the iPhone and most of the things we see and use, but it’s not the time for Flash quite yet.

Why not let Flash do what Flash does best, be the icing on the cake or the heavy-lifter of data-structures. It’s still perfect for animations, components, games and applications (hey, wasn’t that what it was supposed to do?). When HTML and other thechnologies don’t work or takes too long time to make, Flash is still a good alternative, but we developers need to look out for backups on devices that doesn’t run Flash, or don’t support mouse-devices.

Now that CS5 is out with no support for iPhone and really no whole-hearted solution to support the flow of devices thrown at us we need to await Adobes next move…I hope it’s an offensive one