5 takeaways from Adobe Flash’s death march

Rumors of the demise of Flash have been greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain. The multimedia and software platform’s days may well be numbered, but today it’s still alive, even if its kicks are not exactly vigorous.

It’s now five years since the late Steve Jobs published his famous Thoughts on Flash memo, in which he put the knife in to Flash on the grounds that it was proprietary, unreliable and insecure, that it drains mobile device batteries and is a cross-platform development tool that results in developers using only a lowest common denominator set of features.

It’s certainly true that Flash has been plagued by security issues – prompting Mozilla to block Flash plugins in Firefox and Google to block most Flash content from its Chrome browser. Google also converts many Flash ads on its AdWords system into HTML5, and Amazon has also stopped accepting Flash ads entirely.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here