I remember thinking that when Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 there was a good chance that Flash would intentionally or unintentionally fade into a “do you remember when…” state. It would become muddled with PDF, overextended, and poorly transitioned to being an Adobe property. At the time I had not realized the importance of “Flash as a media player.”
I’m reminded of this because I’m staring at the Flash object embedded in the post before this one. All I can see is the clicktoflash button telling me there is a Flash component there that I can interact with if I so choose and it is not immediately clear to me how Adobe has significantly moved Flash forward since 2005.
I think flash is going the way of the dodo and that’s a good thing. It might be around for 5 more years, maybe even 10, but eventually there won’t be any reason left to choose flash if all functionality is available natively in the browser.
Currently Flash faces an uphill battle in HTML user-agents because prominent browser makers don’t feel comfortable giving 3rd party binaries anymore rope with which to hang themselves than necessary. If you look at what browsers are doing in the
<object>and<embed>area it is all about sandboxing them. Because of the performance and security issues I wonder if there really is room for Flash to any grow further.Note that I said “currently” and “prominent” with respect to browser makers. Adobe has tried to move the state-of-art forward with Air but I don’t think the product is compelling enough for consumers to move to it en masse. Air also fails to address the existing deployment problems Flash has on mobile devices.