Yet More on the Unfolding Future-of-Flash-and-the-Web Saga
I love this whole unfolding future-of-Flash saga because it's a wonderful mix of politics and technology. It's complex and multivariate, but not too complex to get a handle on the basic gist. It occurred to me this week …
Context & Ripple Effects
John Gruber's commentary lands mid-arc in a fight that has been building since September 2009, when Apple's decision on which version of Flash ships in Snow Leopard set off a public row over how much say platform owners get over third-party runtimes. Since then the argument has moved from the desktop to the mobile web, where a February 7 analysis framed the contest as Flash against HTML5 in mobile apps.
What makes this installment notable is its frame: Gruber treats the dispute as politics as much as technology — a contest over who controls the web's rich-media layer, not just which codec wins. It follows a provocative January 31 essay arguing Adobe could best save Flash by killing it, a sign the debate has turned from technical merit to Adobe's strategic options.
First-order effects
- Adobe faces mounting pressure on Flash's core premise — one proprietary runtime everywhere — as Apple's platforms exclude it and commentary increasingly treats HTML5 as the viable alternative for mobile content.
- Developers and publishers watching this exchange must weigh building rich experiences twice, in Flash and in HTML5, until one side of the dispute clearly prevails.
Second-order effects
- Apple gains leverage without lifting a finger: every high-profile argument that Flash is politically vulnerable strengthens its case for keeping its own stack closed while pushing competitors' technology out.
- Toolmakers and agencies whose businesses sit on Flash authoring face a forced hedge, redirecting roadmaps toward HTML5 tooling in case the plugin era winds down on mobile.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the web's interactive layer migrates from a single-vendor plugin to open specifications steered by browser and platform makers — shifting power from whoever owns the runtime to whoever controls distribution of the devices people browse on.
The trend: Platform owners are using control of mobile devices to move the web off proprietary plugin runtimes and onto open standards, with Adobe's Flash as the decisive test case.