Apple hasn’t officially explained its decision – but it’s clear that the company wants to marginalize Flash and push a standards-based Web.
They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash.
No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
Most technology analysts see the lack of Flash support on the iPad as a liability.
But most tech analysts thought the same thing about Apple’s decision to drop the disk drive from the iMac.
And – while Flash
Daring Fireballs’ John Gruber responded to the iPad Flash discussion by pointing out the logical direction ahead for developers and content publishers:
Many people will bemoan the lack of support for Adobe’s interactive software, Flash. It wasn’t mentioned, but eagle-eyed viewers would have seen the missing plugin icon on the New York Times site during yesterday’s demo, and given that Apple clearly hates Flash as both a non-open web “standard” and as a buggy, CPU-hungry piece of code, it’s unlikely it will ever be added, unless Apple decides it wants to cut the battery life down to two hours.
Who needs Flash, anyway? YouTube and Vimeo have both switched to H.264 for video streaming (in Chrome and Safari, at least — Firefox doesn’t support it), and the rest of the world of Flash is painful to use.
In fact, we think the lack of Flash in the iPad will be the thing that finally kills Flash itself. If the iPad is as popular as the iPhone and iPod Touch, Flash-capable browsers will eventually be in the minority.