Group Seeks to Make the World Uninstall Flash Player

When webpages weren't much more than text and images peppered with hyperlinks, and when animated elements were limited to slideshow-like animations by Compuserve GIF, Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) transformed the web, making it visually engaging. Even PCs with first-generation Pentium processors and 56K internet connections had access to a much superior internet experience thanks to Flash. According to Adobe's own statistics, over 90% of internet-enabled PCs have the Flash Player browser plugin installed. Apparently the "open/free everything" proponents want the world to get rid of the Flash plugin. Why? Because it's not "open", not all platforms can use it, and it poses security hazards.

Brandishing an extremely original name, "Occupy Flash" calls itself to be a "movement to rid the world of Flash Player plugin," because "Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn't work on most mobile devices. It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology." Occupy Flash argues that with HTML5, Flash is redundant and "free". Not quite; people don't pay for Flash Player plugins, those who create Flash content do, for the Adobe Flash software. It's not like a transition to HTML5 is going to change that equation much. People still won't have to pay to be able to consume public HTML5 content, while those creating it will still need to use proprietary software to create quality content, it's just that they'll end up with more vendors to sell them that.

Recently, Adobe announced that it will discontinue Adobe Flash for mobile devices. Could that be a valid bone of contention of Occupy Flash crowd? It's both yes and no. Very few websites use Flash to run their functional parts (for example, GeForce.com before its HTML "makeover"), besides, trends show an increasing number of websites being mobile-friendly, some sites like ours, have separate pages for PC and mobile platforms. Fora such as the Mobile Web Congress are steering that change, proactively. HTML5 isn't a monolithic "knight in shining armour" that isn't buggy or never needs security patches. Switch to YouTube's HTML5 mode, use it for a week, and tell us your experiences. It's one thing to promote open standards proactively, it's quite another to reactively fight an established standard just because it isn't "open" enough. BRB - occupying a snack bar for some grub.