This is a strategic *business* decision, not a purely technical one.
Steve Jobs has made the strategic business decision that his platform
will not support Flash. What is Intel/Nokia's decision?
Do they think Steve Jobs is wrong? Are they willing to finance open
source Flash libraries that actually work? Are there patents that
would prevent that? Are they willing to license Adobe technology if
that's required to "support Flash?"
I use openSUSE 11.2 as my principal desktop. I've tried all the
available open source Flash plug-ins and there are sites that I visit
that won't play with any of them. Novell has made some kind of deal
with Adobe to allow me to run Adobe's plug-in on my desktop, and the
Adobe plug-in plays these sites.
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky/
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul Erdos
Quoting Katrina Niolet <[email protected]>:
Simply not supporting flash does put pressure on those sites which could
work just as well without it, but not all sites using flash fall into that
category currently. The biggest reason flash has proliferated is that there
is a void that they were able to fill, so while everyone hates it, everyone
puts up with it until something better comes along.
Keep in mind that flash is not used only for pointless youtube videos and
bad programming, there are sites like hulu.com which rely on flash because
there is no widely available alternative currently for delivering the kind
of media experience they want to give. While long term some of the features
of HTML5 are designed to fix these problems, it's still way off and content
providers won't be shifting overnight either. Users may incorrectly blame
the device manufacturer for their memory filling up or slow connections but
they would not be incorrect to blame a manufacturer who sells devices they
can't access their favorite websites on simply because of political reasons.
I like the idea of not downloading and playing flash files unless they are
specifically requested, though. I believe Opera supports this, so it seems
to be something that can be fixed at the browser (or at least rendering
engine) level bypassing the designers and content providers.
--
Katrina
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