Apple versus Adobe.

The iPad won’t have Flash support. I giggle when I write this. It’s not news, at all, I’m just slow on the pick-up. Adobe person on Adobe’s blog reacts to this. A guy at TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) responds to THAT. I lean toward the latter person. I giggle even more than ever.

This is an unexpected turn of events. Apple with its “closed” approach versus Adobe with ITS “closed” approach leading to more openness. Two wrongs do not make one right, you say, and I point at this wonderful, glorious exception of where just precisely that is happening. The very nature of “closed” means you can shut out whoever you want however you want, and Adobe in all of its proprietary glory shuts pretty much everyone except Windows users out (yea, Flash runs horrible on the Mac apparently, it’s a resource hog, and crashes constantly).

And Apple shuts Adobe out. Do you hear my giggles as I wheeze for breath?

It reminds me of MSIE back in the day. It was THE browser. The alternative was Netscape Navigator and it was a disastrous piece of crap where Internet Explorer was a shiny piece of solid gold. So developers ignored everything else. Even when Firefox came around, they continued doing so, at least the short bus folks did. Fuck web standards. Then suddenly, their “dis sait rekirs intrnet exprdorerlolstfu” sites were hurting, badly.

But it took a long while. Banks in Sweden required Internet Explorer up until a mere few years ago. My mother’s stock market site (uh yeah, my mom’s dealing in stock, but that’s another story) even to this day requires Internet Explorer.

Now we have Flash, and we see people doing the same mistake all over again. Especially with the web as it is today, with video content and all that, it’s no wonder people are going for Flash, because Flash is pretty much the only alternative. Well, sort of, anyway. Ah-yep-. If you clicked the link you probably noticed that it said “HTML5″ and if that didn’t mean much to you, let me rephrase:

No Flash.

Actually, I can rephrase that even nicer:

No Proprietary One-Company-To-Rule-Them-All Plugins Required.

Did I mention that HTML5 video is supported by the iPhone?

As a developer, this is the part where you go look at the figures for exactly how many people own an iPhone. And the part where you take a stand on whether the iPad will sell to millions or if it’ll flop over and keel. This is the part where you get the numbers fed to you: 42.5 million.

Forty two point five million iPhones as of Q1 2010. And your cute, bunny-hopping Flash-site? It’s a fucking piece of Lego right now, for those 42.5 million users when they browse on their phone.