Flash on Web Sites & iPad, iPhone

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Kirstie

Kirstie

PFG, Picture Framing God
Joined
Jan 16, 2007
Posts
8,395
Loc
Berkeley, CA
When you are building web sites do you avoid the use of flash slide shows, flickr, and so on because certain mobile devices that are becoming very popular do not support flash? UTube seems to come up Ok on my web designer's site.

Why don't mobile devices show flash? Surely this is a temporary problem, but it has been going on for quite a while.
 
Flash works on Android platform (very recent development, only a few days for mine), but not on Apple products. Steve Jobs publicly said they will not support it.

With the growing popularity of mobile devices, it's probably best to avoid flash entirely - or design the site so it sends people with these devices to an alternate version.

Mike
 
Steve Jobs has an axe to grind with Adobe. They publicly denounce flash by saying it's too slow, buggy and bloated. Which it is. But the real reason is that Steve Jobs is a control freak, and won't let any 3rd party app on the iPhone that runs interpreted code. Abode even came out with a new version of Flash that compiles the flash files to the native objective-C binaries that Apple uses for iOS apps, and right before it was released Apple changed the license terms for developers to disallow 3rd party app making compilers. It's Apple or nothing.

As Mike said, flash is now coming to Android. In fact Google announced it right after the Apple / Adobe debacle.

I'm not a big fan of Flash myself. It doesn't deal with touch devices very well. But it's been around forever and has a huge base of developers. Which is why the MS Silverlight issue hasn't even been mentioned. :)
 
TheFrameGuy said:
"Flash is Dead."
Click to expand...

Actually Der Fuhrer just gave in and now Flash can be used on Apple Products.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20015954-264.html

Many sites can't function without flash. Not that we care but art.com and some of the others use Flash for their visualization software. And LJ uses it to display their moulding catalog.

That being said, there's nothing you can do with Flash that you can't do otherwise.
 
In a way flash can be used. I think Jobs has a piece of software that will "port" flash to the iSeries. Which means it will crash and people will be upset with Flash, not Jobs :)
 
Larry Peterson said:
Actually Der Fuhrer just gave in and now Flash can be used on Apple Products.
Click to expand...

Well, due to the US government getting involved, Apple will now allow iOS developers to use Adobe Flash to compile their software. Flash will still never be on any iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, etc) and quite probably could blocked from OSX (MAC) in future releases.

Once IE9 for Windows is released with its support for HTML5, you'll see the slow death of flash pick up to a faster pace.

Flash runs like #### on Android. Flash is not practical on mobile devices as it kills the battery life.

So my "Flash is Dead" statement is a bit premature. I'll revise that, "Flash will soon be Dead."
 
TheFrameGuy said:
So my "Flash is Dead" statement is a bit premature. I'll revise that, "Flash will soon be Dead."
Click to expand...

Given the need to support ancient and obsolete browsers for the foreseeable future, Flash may never go away. Look at all the people still using IE6. 5.4% of my traffic in July was from IE6 and I got hits from, IE 5.5, 5.0 and 3.02. And another 11.8% was using IE7.

HTML5 is fine and dandy, but until the world forces people to use current browsers, HTML5 may never be accepted. People are not going to program sites using features that are available only on HTML5 until all the old browsers go away. That may be many years from now.

Website owners are not going to penalize themselves by excluding users with older browsers.

Image that tomorrow theGrumble required use of an HTML5 compliant browser. Now image the outcry and call for lynching of the mods and the very quick reversal to a non-HTML5 site.
 
Larry Peterson said:
Website owners are not going to penalize themselves by excluding users with older browsers.
Click to expand...

I don't agree with that statement since major players like Google have dumped all support of IE6 and earlier browsers from MSFT. As soon as Google announced they weren't supporting IE6, most professional Web developers followed suit. Also, anybody who has flash on their website today is already excluding visitors using mobile browsers.
 
TheFrameGuy said:
I don't agree with that statement since major players like Google have dumped all support of IE6 and earlier browsers from MSFT. As soon as Google announced they weren't supporting IE6, most professional Web developers followed suit. Also, anybody who has flash on their website today is already excluding visitors using mobile browsers.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying it is going to take a long time to happen. I personally don't like Flash. And I also agree that Google did a good thing by removing support for IE6. But there are still so many people and businesses that continue, and will continue, to use obsolete browsers. Many of these are technically challenged and will never upgrade.

According to flashmagazine.com 30-40% of all web sites use Flash. Here is the article: http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/how_many_sites_use_flash/ These stats are from 2008 but couldn't find any more recent stats.

And of course, you can't watch videos from YouTube or just about any other video site without Flash. Flash is going to be with us until YouTube and others move to something else. HTML5 will change this but only for those with current browsers.

I recently did a site and had a choice between Flash and Javascript/Ajax. I choose the later.
 
YouTube.com has been testing HTML5 for about a year. You can see how it works here: http://www.youtube.com/html5. Even embedded YouTube videos will now display via HTML5 when viewed using HTML5 capable browsers: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/07/new-way-to-embed-youtube-videos.html. I am a regular iPad user and I can tell you that many mainstream sites, like ESPN.com, use Flash video for most visitors, but when those same sites are visited by iOS users, the video is served up using HTML5. All the big video "players" like YouTube, Hulu, ABC, etc are all in the middle of HTML5 testing. Once they all flip (within 2 years), that will be it for Flash.

P.S. - I'm not an Apple "fanboy." This message was posted via my Dell XPS laptop running Microsoft Windows 7 64 bit. :)
 
We dumped all the flash from our home page as of today. I'll miss the examples of our work slide show, but the reality is that more and more people are using mobile devices, and we have to be visible on them.

We are also WAY behind the times on our old html platform, but it will all modernize in good time.
 
Kirstie said:
Does this appear on the iPad, iPhone, etc.?
Click to expand...

Kirstie,
This is what I use in my website's home page.
Try to view http://ArtHausFraming.com in your iPhone or iPad.
It is the big banner right under the header. You just have to wait a few seconds to see it change becuase I think I have set the transition to 7seconds per image.

If you need help, let me know, I can give you some code snippets that you can easily use.
Regards,
Troy
 
Thanks everyone. I will pass this along to Mike when I don't have him snowed under with other work ;)
 
I try to avoid using Flash and other languages that require plugins, because a.) we're in a state that still has a lot of people on dial-up, using older computers, and b.) they can be security issues and resource hogs. Hubs and I tend to stick with HTML, CSS and (in his case) Javascript. (I know basic Javascript, but I try to stick with HTML and CSS.)
 
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