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Adobe has recently seen the opinion of their Flash runtime turn significantly against with Apple joining the fray by refusing to allow the flash plugin to run on MobileSafari. This now means that the iPod, iPhone and iPad have no access to any flash content. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, has even went as far to say that the ‘majority’ of Mac computer crashes were down to the poor functioning of the Flash plugin.

One of the major criticisms of Flash is the giant overhead that it takes performance wise to run. While recent developments with Flash 10.1 have seen hardware acceleration, the implementation leaves something to be desired – with only some versions of Windows getting access to hardware accelerated video decoding, while Mac and Linux (currently) being left to decode video in software, leading to a dramatic performance penalty.

The other major problem with Flash is the closed nature of the plugin. Attempts to make a competing runtime (such as SWFDec and Gnash) which would be open source currently lag dramatically behind Adobe’s version, offering little-to-no compatibility with most Flash items seen on the web. This means that Adobe is the only one that will provide a plugin. Adobe has recently ‘suspended’ Linux 64-bit Flash player downloads; leaving millions of users without a way to view flash or a viable alternative. Development tools are also dominated by Adobe Flash Builder, which does not run on all platforms.

Furthermore, with search engine optimisation and accessibility being such an important part of the web these days, presenting Flash content while optimising for Google and other search engines poses a difficult issue. Google simply does not pick up the majority of Flash content, which means the site is ‘invisible’ to Google – terrible for improving your ranking on search keywords. Additionally, for users who require larger text, low contrast or screenreaders Flash has generally had very poor options for integrating with these systems.

Adobe has a huge problem on its hands, however. While Flash still commands a huge installed base, with many designers and developers behind it, the tide seems to be turning with the advent of smartphones. Flash recently did release Flash Player 10.1 for Android OS, but performance is not up to scratch and many sites struggle to work correctly with it. Furthermore, the increased performance that Flash requires ends up in very poor battery life as the CPU cannot go into low power mode.

Unless Adobe can dramatically streamline the runtime code to avoid such a significant penalty on the processor, I simply cannot see how in today’s low-power focussed world Flash can turn round the increasingly negative view of its Flash product.

Next time: Why HTML5 and CSS3 present a great alternative to Adobe Flash

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