The iPad's War on Flash May Be Over Before It Begins

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Posted Friday, April 02, 2010 6:54 AM

The iPad's War on Flash May Be Over Before It Begins

Nick Summers

The reviews for the iPad are in, and predictably, they're raves. "Apple has pretty much nailed it with this first iPad," says Ed Baig in USA Today. "This beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly," trumpets The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. Even the usual nitpick for critics, battery life, turned out to be a plus: Steve Jobs actually undersold what the device could do, with one test lasting more than 12 hours.

Pretty much the only drawback that the early critics identify is the iPad's lack of support for Flash, which renders unusable a huge range of video, animation, and game sites ranging from Funny or Die to Farmville. Shortly after the iPad was announced in January, an Adobe employee mocked up a collection of screen shots to illustrate what Flash-heavy sites would look on the device. "Millions of websites use Flash. Get used to the blue legos," he blogged, referring to the sad little error icons that appear when the Apple browser encounters a missing plug-in.

Apple says Flash is buggy and hogs resources, and flatly refuses to consider implementing it for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The company thinks it can leverage its position as the dominant maker of mobile Internet devices in the United States to force sites to use a different video standard—this is why you might've seen the term "HTML5" batted around lately. It's a fairly audacious position—even for Apple—to insist that the entire Internet change to better suit a few devices.

The crazy part is, a day before the iPad even hits stores, Steve Jobs is already winning the fight. This week, the video service Brightcove, which powers sites like The New York Times and Time, announced that it would help its customers stream video in HTML5 over Flash, meaning iPad users won't encounter those blue Lego-like icons after all. Apple has aggressively posted a list of such "iPad ready" sites using HTML5, including CNN, Major League Baseball, whitehouse.gov, Flickr, and TED ("iPad ready"—only Apple could get away with this spin. It's not that the iPad doesn't do the whole Web; it's that the Web isn't ready for the iPad!)