Virgin American dumps Adobe Flash for iPhone users

"Begun this Flash war has."

It's happening . . .

...going down.

Where are the astro turfers?

Gf Adobe.

Nice! No more flash, no more flash, no more flash!

Or at least deliver a really good version ..... which isnt gonna happen so above statement holds.

I'm not a big fan of flash (I have to sign on with a Guest account to watch some websites! can someone help me?), but couldn't Virgin just check what browser the visitor is using? If it's a computer, use Flash. If it's a mobile device, don't use flash?

I'm probably missing something.

You are more than welcome to adopt it as your own. Heck, use the same colours if you want!

Hehe, well done!

It is just costly to maintain multiple versions. Virgin being closely tied to the mobile community it makes sense for them to focus on supporting iPhones. The article makes a lot of good points about Flash not being suitable for mobile and also the blind, however in the latter case, HTML programmers are not any more considerate than Flash developers about making things accesible.

We have been developing special iPhone sites for our clients that are trimmed down and only deliver the essential facts and leave our desktop versions without restrictions. I find that even non Flash sites are often developed in such a way that it makes it difficult to navigate on an iPhone, mostly from the size and closness of the buttons and links. You have to zoom way up to be able to select things. So iPhone is really not an ideal web browser device in any senerio even without Flash.

From my perspective totally giving up Flash it is like giving up steak because your neighbor is a vegetarian.

Having just recently upgraded from 10.3.9 to 10.6.2 seeing the headline to this article reminded me to go and try out the HTML5 beta at YouTube. On my Mini (2.53) the CPUs ran at c.12% and 15% respectively, and when reverting back to the Flash version the same clip ran at c.24% and 26% respectively. So there was a big CPU saving, but there were three differences in Flash's favour. On the HTML5 version the clip did not start until it had all loaded, which would be a nuisance on a big clip. Although there was an expanded size screen available it could not go full-screen, nor did it have the click links on the screen at the end. I don't know if HTML5 will be able to add those capabilities as it develops (would it be possible to go full-screen i.e work outside the browser?) but it does seem to be a case of pros and cons as it stands.

This is going to raise some eyebrows, and I bet Virgin won't be the last to do this either!

I love Flash ads! With Click-to-Flash I can disable all the ads.

If they give up Flash I will have to view them again.

But on a more serious note... While I am a big fan of moving away from proprietary technology, I think this aritcle should have mentioned one major issue I have heard regarding HTML5 - the inability to protect copywrited content. That is not a trivial issue.

Another flash site bites the dust.

It's more like giving up steak because your customers are becoming vegetarian, I guess.

I'm pretty sure that's on the list.

The first nail in a Flash coffin!






.

Ultimately, that is what will essentially have to happen, though primarily when it comes to video and animations. Flash has plenty of pros, but none of them are on mobile with a tiny screens and low performance.

On a PC it has more benefits but it still uses an excessive amount of resources and takes longer to render than open standards. It also causes problems when doing web searches, page searches and forget about using Full Page Zoom on a page with Flash controls.

Because of older browsers and, of course, IE there will need to a fall back to Flash where modern browsers can't reach. They could also request that you update your browser and supply appropriate links the same way Adobe tells you to update Flash when the required plug-in is out of date. I'm sure both of these will happen.

Google is already offering a beta of the HTML5 video tag for YouTube. Eventually That will be standard for browsers that support HTML5 and H.264. On another front, for a completely different reason, they are dropping any support for IE6 across all their sites. This trend will also likely take off causing many consumers and companies finally moving to a newer version which means devs won't have to worry about it any longer.

Where are the trolls that claim nobody develops for the iPhone?

It's on like a JavaScript version of Donkey Kong!

First? More like the fifth or sixth.

The trolls are currently occupied on the "Apple sues HTC" threads.

Cheers dude, thanks for that most welcome update, I obviously missed those and long may they contnue to rain down on this Flash coffin (informal definition - an old and unsafe aircraft or vessel)





.

(Italian music playing in the background)...

You maka Steve so Happee!

Did he make you an offer, you couldn't refuse?

Fullscreen is possible with ClickToFlash on YouTube via QuickTime.

Remove YouTube from your whitelist and deselect the "Load H.264 videos from YouTube" option in the ClickToFlash settings. Now load a page on YouTube and look for the little tool symbol (similar to the "Action" menu icon in a Finder window's toolbar). Clicking on this opens a menu with options to play a video fullscreen in QuickTime or download the actual H.264 encoded MP4 file straight to your drive.

Hope that's a good enough stop-gap measure while we wait for a slightly more straightforward way integrated straight into the browser.

Here's a well done video player done completely in HTML5 - works in your iPhone or iPod touch nicely. It has all your normal Flash type controls and believe it goes full-screen (on my phone, so can't test that now). Give it a look. And this is just the very beginning HTML5 will get better, more versatile, and fancy in time.

http://jilion.com/sublime/video


A tech savvy person can now download Flash files from Firefox and others and copy them or bring into a video editor and make edits or change it from a Flash video file to mov or wmv etc. I do it from time to time. So, nothing is 100%. I welcome HTML5, will be a few years till it's a standard, but good to see progress.

What's 'Flash?'

Either way steak is so tasty. I'm really not opposed to a salad once and awhile for lunch when i want to eat light.

MAny of my customers who own iPhones still prefer Flash on their own web sites. I'm providing an alternative to Flash on thier sites specifically for iPhone.

For some reason around here I think it is mostly the vocal minority who are dissing Flash. In the real world people are not as concerned about the alledged negatives and rather enjoy the elegance and finesse that Flash enables.

And so the Flash exodus begins.

In all reality, it's only a temporary inconvenience for the Flash fanboys. Eventually, HTML5 will be mainstream which will make the issue a moot point, or (doubt it) Adobe will address the deficiencies in a way that gets Apple's approval.

In the end, regardless of what eventually happens the solution will be a leaner, more elegant way of doing mobile content. So I'm on board with this.

I do hate Flash though and do not miss it in even the least on my iPhone.

Can not agree with your last sentence majority of people that use Flash do not know the "elegance and finesse that Flash enables" there use it because that what's there.

This discussion is being undertaken by minority group of people compared to the number of users that use Flash or HTML5 and the latter does not know better. As usually once the dust has settled, the improvement will be better for everyone, but the average user will not notice the difference except for those that may notice improvement in "speed" of their computer.

Before I start shouting that this is beginning of Flash end, I want to see more companies moving to the HTML5 standard.

You can also play flv wrapped videos directly in Quicktime if you have the right codecs.

I have Perian and VLC installed, I've found Quicktime plays some flv files better than VLC.

Okay, thanks. Actually this is a hypothetical for me as I use Firefox as my default browser because I like the add-ons (including FlashBlock natch!) and youtubemp will download the .flv as an MP4.


Thanks for your reply as well. I've actually seen the vid before - very impressive image quality I must say, although with it filling the browser, and the browser full-screen i.e full-screen video apart from the toolbar, it is quite CPU heavy. Still, as you say, early days. I agree absolutely with your last comment - irrespective of Flash's crappy performance on a Mac, the principle of open standards on the web is a fundamental one. No one single entity, in this case Adobe, should have any sort of lock on what is now a basic utility.

First a correction, you can't with DRM-protected Flash movies, and that's really the point.

But, that point aside, Apple Insider's recent flash-obsession is starting to really look pathetic. This isn't apple news, or rumors, or really anything. It's just a chance to score points with the anti-flash crowd, and a pretty week one at that.

Seriously? The extent of interactivity on Virgin America homepage was a couple of images that slid left and right, and somehow this is some huge blow to Flash? Really? I think we're grasping at straws here people. What's worse, the article is just plain wrong. As far as I can tell, Flash has been removed from the homepage... not the entire site. Visit the route maps link here: http://www.virginamerica.com/va/trav...emap_right_bar ... Flash. Even do it on a iPhone... nice little link prompting you to download the flash plugin.

What I find most peculiar is why we care? If you really hate flash that much, uninstall the plugin and leave the rest of us alone. And, note that I said uninstall the plugin, and not "clicktoflash"... if you really don't care about the lack of it on your phone, then man-up and do the same for your desktop.

Just switched over the HTML5 on YouTube (using Safari), and the clips I watched started playing before they were completely loaded. Seemed snappier than the Flash version, too!

I think Virgin is making the a good decision for two reasons. First, they really don't require any of the more complex features of Flash and second by the very nature of their business, they obviously have a need to cater to the mobile crowd in as light-wieght a way as possible. I suspect we will see a lot of similar circumstances moving towards using the HTML5 video tag.

All that being said most of this:


Is total sensationalist crap written by someone who CLEARLY doesn't do web development.

Let's be honest here, it doesn't really matter if the haters or fanboys of this board agree or not with what developers do. Because those of us who are developers are not going to ask you for your opinion when we develop websites.

To give you a frame of reference, I currently work as a new media designer and developer and have been for the past 10 years. I use all of the following languages on a regular basis: PHP, JS, FLEX, AS3, HTML & XML. I also love Apple products and own more of them than any reasonable person should.

But this site is simply lying to you. regularly, in part I believe to drive traffic and in part because he is a moron who drinks his own kool-aid. To debunk some specific comments I would like to point out that:



Wrong in a few ways. First Sliverlight and Flash both are hardly presentational languages. In fact, HTML and CSS are presentational languages. Both Silverlight and Flash can access and write to databases, and return information dynamically. HTML only presents the layout and CSS styles it. Also how in the world are users interpreting how they want to see a webpage just because its in HTML?

If you wanted to have an informed conversation about dynamic and interactive vs "presentational only" sites made without Flash or Silverlight than you would talk about languages like .net, php and JS. You're inability to actually compare relevant technologies only illustrates your lack of understanding.



How does CSS scale web complexity? Do you even know what that means? You don't need CSS at all to scale your site to a mobile device if that's what your actually referring to. it's easily done with a meta tag, and thats just plain 'ol HTML 4. BTW FLEX supports CSS as well, not just HTML.


As long as those desires don't involve complex interactivity or dynamic manipulation of data, which in fact millions of users do actually want. Don't get me wrong I love CSS but its clear you have absolutely no idea what it does.

To simplify it for you, all CSS does in a nut-shell is address how things will look. Fonts, Colors, Layout...that sort of thing. However that is only a small piece of the presentation of information. What makes tools like Silverlight and Flex so powerful is that they can address the visual needs of web development AND the dynamic data driven needs of web development.

If you really want to know....

Perhaps the most exciting thing about HTML5 and CSS3 for those of us who actually do web development instead of fantasize about it, is the addition of block level tags like <nav> or <footer> or the ability to create drop shadows, embed fonts and use rounded corners without JS. Hell even the canvas could be pretty sweet sometime around IE 10. The <video> tag however, is probably the least interesting part.


Actually, any site that uses MouseOver will have those events neglected. Its common all over the web particularly in navigation as you mentioned. However, that is in no way solely a problem related to Flash. in fact the majority of these problems are done in Javascript where MouseOver states are extremely common and JS games built with this way will also fail to work. What you fail to mention and probably fail to realize is that there is nothing stopping anyone from creating content that will work just fine. And if your complaint is that old web sites don't work so well....welcome to the 20th century, thats been a problem for years.

AS for Flash and touch....
Three years ago I developed a series of touch-screen kiosks for a tradeshow all in AS3. It's not only possible to develop for touch, its easy. The fact that there are web based games that were developed before touch screens were viable on mobile devices is not an inherent problem with Flash its just a development issue related to platforms.



Unfortunately, for all the reasons I listed above, HTML5 doesn't actually deliver most of the functionality of Flash. Thats just a misconception at best and a fabrication at worst. Developers however, already know this. So you can rest assured we wont be abandoning Flash for HTML5 anytime soon. Now if Microsoft would stop cock-blocking JS Harmony (google it) then we could have a serious conversation about the future of Flash.

I know a lot of you will call me an Apple hater or an Adobe fan boy but really I'm not. You're just being fed a bunch of crap by this site that really isn't based in reality. I actually love Apple, which is why I still come to this site....and when the iPad has a USB port a front facing camera and yes..Flash. Than ill probably buy one

What the heck kind of answer is that? I'm pretty sure it's on the list...

If the inability to protect content from being copied hasn't been addressed then what the hell are you adding your signature to every post for.

You're signature gives the impression that you believe in sites like Bit Torrent.

1. It was an ignorant answer with no thought or research on your side.
2. HTML5 is not open source and you still have to license it to legally use it.

Flash will live for many years to come as will your obvious addiction to Kool-Aid.

How is this possible? I thought all 'real' web content was flash-based, or is that just for 13 year olds and porn addicts?

Crazy! You are from India and you are okay with my unabashed beef eating but take issue with me extolling the elegance of Flash. What sacrilege! Holy Cow.

*AMEN* ;-)

A new aspect of the anti-Flash stance by Apple is TiVo's just-released Series 4 DVRs that heavily utilize Flash in the UI. Apple's stance can now be seen as helping to bolster AppleTV against TiVo.