The iPad and the Flashless Web

One complaint that I have heard from iPad critics is that the iPad will lack Flash support.  They make the claim that without Flash, the 80% of websites out there that use flash in one way or another will be useless.  Critics who obviously do not understand the mass appeal of the iPad, try to categorize it as a tablet and then criticize it for not conforming.

The iPad is a mobile device that runs the iPhone OS but lacks the phone.  It is essentially a oversized iPod Touch with an optional 3G data connection.  As a result, the iPad is not a Tablet computer, nor is it a Netbook or Ultra Mobile PC..  It is not subject to boot up times, sleep, hibernate and does not run a full sized operating system such as Windows 7 or Mac OSX.  It is the first of what is sure to be a new category of devices that is instantly on when you need it, runs games and multimedia like a champ, can access the web, email, social networking and all the software on Apple's App Store.

At the time of writing this post, there are no mobile phones out there that run Flash.  Why?  All the nice animations, sound effects and video have a cost.  And that cost is the Central Processing Unit of the computer or mobile phone running it.  For mobile phones, taxing the CPU means wasting battery life that you can literally feel as the waste product of the CPU, heat, turns your phone into a personal hand-warmer.

Although 80% of the websites out there have Flash on it, most of those sites utilize flash to do banner ads, or smaller home page animations meant to capture attention but only serves as "eye candy", and is not critical to the site content or navigation.  Is this "eye candy" worth the price of a dramatically reduced battery life?  Apple thinks it isn't.  And the lack of Flash hasn't stopped all the millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users from spending several hours per week browsing the "Flashless" web.

Apple has publicly criticized Adobe, who makes Flash, for not making the software more efficient on both the full sized computer and on mobile devices.  Apple has also made comments endorsing the emergence of HTML5, a new standard which would allow multimedia to be played in a browser without a plug-in.  The emergence of this technology would allow Apple to render multimedia in its own Safari browser without Flash or Quicktime, Apples current multimedia plug-in.

With the popularity of Apples mobile devices, it has considerable clout.  Many sites out there are beginning to rethink using Flash and are designing their sites to be more mobile device friendly so that they can provide a similar user experience as those tethered to their PC or Laptop.  Apple has already proved its users can operate just fine in a "Flashless" web, the ball is now in Adobe's court to keep that from happening.