Steve Jobs has posted his thoughts on the Adobe Flash debate. Very interesting read.
EDIT: Good replies from Jesse Warden and Uza.
Interesting blog post on eric e. dolecki’s site here on the topic of Flash’s survival. I’m not sure how much of an issue poor(er) Flash performance on the Mac is for the guys at Adobe, but considering Flash has performed worse on the Mac for years now I’m guessing it’ll continue to remain somewhere down the list of priorities to sort.
Flash isn’t likely to die anytime soon in my opinion (despite all the HTML5 raving at the moment). Flash’s feature set isn’t as widely available in any browser or plug-in and as all developers having to tailor for IE6 *spits* knows; getting users to upgrade and/or install new software isn’t always straightforward.
While I’d love for Adobe to spend time ensuring what great features currently within Flash are made bulletproof (Mac support, accessibility, etc), Flash’s survival is likely to be largely dependent on what standout features the product supports. Standing still and building upon what’s currently within Flash allows competitors to gain ground, which is why I’m guessing each new version of Flash will continue to showcase cutting edge new features.
Looks like a heap of useful new features have been added to SWFObject. Spotted thanks to an email from Swingpants.
Apple have updated Safari to version 3.1 to include support for a lot of cutting-edge technology (including client-side database storage), along with adding a native developer dropdown (enabled within the preferences section). With Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 coming soon and, erm, IE8, it’s looking like the browser market is about to make web developer’s lives a lot more interesting soon.
By “interesting” I of course mean more difficult!
P.S. Visit this page in Safari 3.1 to see some funky CSS animation. Coo!
Two competing standards currently going at it to become the future markup language of the web, XHTML2 and HTML5. Mozilla, Opera and Apple are siding with HTML5, but there are also arguments from the other perspective, that XHTML2 is preferable to HTML5.
I’m unfortunately betting on whichever Microsoft decide to go with.