Flash on smartphones
I had a great chuckle in this article linked from Daring Fireball about 10 reasons why the Droid Bionic will score over the iPhone 5, and one of the reasons being the support of Flash (emphasis mine):
This is a big advantage an Android systems holds against iPhone. Flash enriches Web experience. Any Flash player has to be able to animate on top of video renderings, which makes hardware accelerated video rendering at least not as straightforward as with a purpose-built multimedia player. Therefore, even when only displaying video, Flash players are more resource-intensive than a dedicated video player software. Presently for Apple, only Mac OS 9/X supports Flash. As Droid Bionic comes with the Android OS, it enjoys the full support of flash.
Two things here:
- Flash degrades, not enriches the web experience
- No one enjoys the full support of Flash
I had Flash on my Droid for about a month before I uninstalled it. I had forgotten how much Flash degrades the browsing experience, and I don’t really want my phone battery life to go down because of Flash being more resource-intensive.
Who are these people that actually care about Flash on a phone? It’s just baffling to me.
I really do feel bad for Flash developers, as at least Silverlight-specialized developers will have the .NET Framework to fall back on.