The Flashless Future

Adobe Flash

Those two words have driven fear, annoyance and hate into the hearts of many users and developers for some time now. I am here to say today, in case you had not noticed, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I say with certainty that the days Adobe Flash enjoys as a dominant web development tool are numbered.

Don't believe me? Just take a look at the many popular flash based services that are moving away from the stale technology. Two such examples of this are the music streaming service Pandora (which is now fully HTML5) and the popular video streaming site Youtube (which currently offers a beta HTML5 version). Google+ also display any linked to Youtube videos using the HTML5 technology.

It isn't just websites that are predicting the end of flash though. Microsoft recently announced that it's new version of Internet Explorer for Windows 8 on ARM will not support plugins of any sort. In fact they went so far to state the obvious:

Java script and HTML5 technologies are the way of the future for web design.

While FOSS advocates such as myself have felt this way for some time it was wonderful to hear it come from the king of closed source software.

Finally, the last sign that flash will soon be a thing of the past is Adobe's own "Edge Technology". Edge is designed to help web developers create web content using only Java Script, HTML5 and CSS3. When even the creator of flash realizes their  technology is on the way out I hope everyone else does as well.

~Jeff Hoogland