[ad#google]If you saw the keynote, or at least read stuff on Engadget, you know that the iPad doesn’t support Flash.
The fact that the iPad does not support Flash goes hand in hand with the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which both never supported and still don’t support Flash. In fact, it might just be part of Apple’s strategy; that is replacing the number one Flash application which is video playback with native support, a.k.a. HTML 5 video, and leaving all the extra power to the development of iPad/iPhone/iTouch apps.
Although only a rumored strategy, it’s clear that it’s what they’re doing, and the iPad goes a long way in proving it on top of what the iPhone already did.
One of the big markets for the App Store is video games, and video games can be programmed in Flash. In fact, Adobe is testing touch functionality for its latest Flash 10.1 release which is in beta as of this writing, clearly a threat to Apple’s ecosystem of apps if they were to support Flash. Instead of having to go through the App Store and everything that’s bad with it, developers would simply have to use Flash to put their apps to market, which incidentally would also make those available to everyone and not just on the iPad, clearly something Apple wants to avoid.
An iPad without Flash; a complete web platform?
Arguably, a web browser without Flash is far from complete. It wouldn’t even support the most visited web sites like YouTube. Apple solves this problem with the YouTube app, but that was only an obvious fit for an iPhone where most Flash apps wouldn’t even make sense because of the smaller screen.
On the iPad however, you’ve got an entirely different story. Users will be asking for Flash as they see that many web sites are not supported. But the same has already happened with the iPod Touch and the iPhone and has also brought myriad web sites to change their strategies and go away from Flash.
In fact, the current web development trend is to do the most stuff possible without Flash, or any other plugin for that matter. It’s already a dead-end for Silverlight, which still doesn’t have a lot of market share, and it seems Java is losing ground too in an area that’s beginning to reject anything called a plugin.
Possibly even more staggering, browsers like Internet Explorer that fail to support newer HTML capabilities are quickly losing market share. It’s quite simple in a user’s mind; if it doesn’t work, they’ll look elsewhere, and that all starts in the hands of the developers.
Apple is casually riding on this wave and hence, a flash-less iPad makes more and more sense, and whatever Google decides to embed in its future Chrome OS will probably see its way to Safari too, given both are based off the Webkit engine. Given that all three iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad use Safari, they’re very well-placed platforms for the future of the web.
The Chrome OS Strategy
Although clearly Google isn’t in the same camp as Apple, its strategy for Chrome OS seems to be very much plugin agnostic, albeit for different motives on the ground of how apps can be developed for its products; that is it has no intention of profiting from closed systems and trapping developers in them.
Although still an economical game, Google is profiting from the market in a very different way, and thus allowing developers to do anything they want on Chrome OS is not bad for them, which is very different than the situation Apple is in. I don’t expect the Chrome OS not to have Flash, especially since Google is part of Adobe’s Open Screen Project which aims to bring Flash support to every mobile platform in existence. It wouldn’t make sense for them to drop Flash, and although Google still has the time to make YouTube entirely Open Video, I’m not sure they’re quite there yet. In fact, I expect Chrome OS to support all three Flash, Silverlight and Java, much like the current Google Chrome supported Silverlight despite Microsoft not offering any support for it. This is very much in line with Google’s way of doing things, which is simply to make stuff accessible as possible.
A prime, but maybe simply obvious example of this is Google Search and Microsoft Bing. Google Search still works on Internet Explorer 6 while Bing gives out a JScript error and fails to display the background image. Sure, the fading thing on Google is simply absent on IE 6 (who cares really, I still think it’s an annoying feature) but you have to give it something for the fact it doesn’t throw an error at you. That’s Google saying “please use something better” with a little Chrome add everywhere and Microsoft saying “upgrade or just go away, 9 years of support is enough” to 20% or 13% (depending on which sources you refer to) of the Internet population as of this writing, clearly demonstrating Google’s stance on how it serves up the web.
With Google pushing JavaScript where it’s never gone before, introducing a new programming language and buying On2, it looks like Google is aiming for a plugin-less web too, and gladly so is the rest of the world (see the HTML 5 crowd). There is gap in Google’s strategy though, how do they plan on making complex apps possible for the web?
If you were to listen to the way Google apprehends Chrome OS’s goals, they clearly are not gonna promote Linux-based apps development on it. In fact, they might as well disable this possibility, but recent developer talks has negated the disabling possibility by confirming Chrome OS will have an embedded multimedia player that works seamlessly within a Chrome browser tab. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were made with Go, Google’s new programming language. In my opinion, the Chrome browser will eventually turn out to be a Go virtual machine, allowing complex web apps to be deployed natively directly in the browser, much Java except it would act like JavaScript. There’s also the possibility for Go to be supported across Webkit, which would make Safari also supported, and hence enable the iPad to run the apps. That’s bad for Apple, but good for Google, so guess what’s gonna happen.
Also, talking HTML 5 and all future things non-flash, let’s not forget Google bought On2. On2 is the codec company responsible for VP6, the first video codec supported by Flash. They are now up to VP8, a codec which clearly surpasses H.264, the current codec of choice for both Flash and Silverlight, as well as HTML 5 video on Chrome and Safari. On2 is also responsible for releasing VP3 as open source, which gave birth the Theora and OGG, the current HTML 5 video open codec supported by Chrome and Firefox. It’s no wonder Google bought On2; they’re probably on to open sourcing VP8 and making it an HTML 5 video supported codec. If that goes out, the open source community will obviously jump on it, Mozilla included, so Firefox will surely support it. This also gives a logical rise to the possibility of YouTube eventually running on HTML 5 video, something Theora can’t achieve because of its compression inferiority to H.264.
Where’s Microsoft
Frankly, I don’t know. Except for the very cool video hardware acceleration for Internet Explorer 9, they’re tests don’t even make it faster than Firefox 3.6 at loading web pages in general. The only possible future for Microsoft would be Silverlight, but if we are to believe how the web is evolving, that’s clearly not where the world is going.
It’s a sad thing because despite being real dogs; that is being extremely slow, developing on Microsoft software is really a breeze in comparison to similar offerings. However, the market has proven the tools are far from being what determines what developers will develop for. If it were so, Microsoft wouldn’t be losing ground.
Adobe Flash vs Developers
Whatever the future of the web, it’s still the future, and the current reality is that the Adobe Flash platform is currently omnipresent. What’s more, the mobile industry only represents a little over 1% of the global web, which while maybe untrue for wares such as Facebook, is very true for the rest of the world. The main browsing activities still happen on full-fledged browsers, even when people are on Netbooks, and not supporting Flash means not supporting YouTube and lots of other web sites.
Because of that, there’s a strong possibility that the full browsing expectations of consumers on the iPad, given its display size, might just backfire at Apple when thousands of consumers discover it doesn’t support their favorite online destinations.
In the end however, it’s really just a fight between Adobe Flash and developers. Firefox has proven that the real people who are pulling the strings behind the web market are the developers, much like Google Android is actively proving the real people pulling the strings behind the apps market on mobile devices are developers. How? By actively pulling away market share from places developers stop supporting and actively giving market share to newer, more developer-friendly mediums. There’s market share, but there’s convictions for a better future.
Firefox is the very proof. Web developers have boycotted Microsoft’s Internet Explorer so much that users are moving away from it at a rapid pace for the simple reason web sites just don’t work on it anymore. Internet Explorer is currently losing market share at the rate of 1% to 2% per month. This means that in approximately 3 to 4 years, if it keeps on dropping, Internet Explorer’s market share will have greatly plummeted at which point it will be a minor browser with its only chance of survival being shear technical prowesses, something it’s currently very bad at.
This gives rise to the fact that if developers decide to drop Flash support and go to something else, Adobe will see its Flash plugin die, putting both Google and Apple in a very good position.
Apple vs The World
If you take a look at the list of partners on Adobe’s Open Screen Project web site, it’s only funny to think the only two major companies in the area not on it are Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft has already voiced its intention of putting Flash on its Windows Mobile phones in the same way OSP partners plan to, but Apple has almost openly declared war against Flash, and one has to think that with all the companies figuring on this list, it’s almost like they just declared standards war against the rest of the world, or did they just ally with the rest of world (sane HTML 5 people who hate Flash for very good reasons) against the rest of the proprietary software companies? Arguably Google’s decision to join the OSP is almost as if they only did so because they wanted to put Flash on their Android so that it would have something to go against the iPhone’s mighty market share.
The Plugin Agnostic Web
All in all, although I think the iPad’s future is questionable, the future is most likely not downloaded apps on the iPad and most likely more Google than the iPad would lead to believe. It’s also plugin agnostic, but unfortunately for those who want to invest skills in developing complex applications that require more than just JavaScript on the web, there’s no real future-stable solution out there, although fortunately only for now.
AJAX is doomed to be replaced, Flash has a very bad reputation and tendency to be rejected, Silverlight is years too late to market and Java on the client web will probably disappear completely shortly after 2010. In other words, for anyone with enough perception to realize this, investing your skills in any of the current client-side technologies seems very bleak.
Fear not however, Chrome OS is scheduled for somewhere in 2010 if I’m not mistaken and with the pace at which companies were moving in 2009 and are moving in 2010 we’re sure to know exactly what’s at stake by the next few months.
In any cases I would be much more excited as a developer to know that I can program something cool that runs native in a browser than to know that I can program something only compatible with Windows, *cough* excuse me, only compatible with the iPad, a.k.a. iPhone OS…
