Hey Gruber, what about the users?

http://scripting.com/stories/2010/08/31/heyGruberWhatAboutTheUsers.html

by brilliant • 16 years ago

31 48 16 years ago

scripting.com

pistoriusp• 16 years ago

We must be using different Internet or maybe the website I browse aren't flash heavy.

I cannot recall a single instance where I thought... "Damn! If only I had flash on my iPad/ iPhone."

daleharvey2• 16 years ago

I have a htc desire that supports flash and havent once though, "Phew I am glad my phone supports flash".

I am considering finding out how to disable it, the battery life isnt awesome and if my laptop is anything to go by, flash is pretty high on that culprit list.

doron• 16 years ago

In the options of the browser, under plugins. I have set it to prompt, best of both worlds.

jonknee4• 16 years ago

Try browsing for a new car or clothes. For whatever reason both of those verticals are highly dependent on Flash and as such unusable on the iPad. I would have thought luxury brands would have figured out by now that iOS demographics trend affluent and should be valued.

Update: Case in point...

http://hugoboss.com - usable mobile site, but you can't see or buy any of the clothes!

http://bananarepublic.gap.com/ - "Flash required" error message and the same goes for the other Gap brands

http://gucci.com - it's just a black screen

http://dior.com - "Flash required" error

Etc etc, it's nutty. Car sites are a little better and usually break in more subtle ways (videos that don't work is common). Cadillac actually has a nice iPad optimized site, so kudos there.

http://mazdausa.com - redirected to a really low-fi mobile version with much less information. A step up from WAP, not much.

http://bmwusa.com - same as Mazda, a really horrible mobile site that is a column about 200px wide

http://www.miniusa.com/ - "Flash required" error page

bonzoesc• 16 years ago

Not sure what kind of grocery-getter you were looking at, but the Audi USA site let me ogle and price hot an R8 on my iPad just fine.

silvestrov• 16 years ago

It seems like those sites are exactly the kind of products I prefer to look at In Real Life, and not just as pictures on a computer.

Due to broken bones which forces me to stay at home, I've bought clothes online and it has resulted in a significant number of unpleasant surprises which are trivial to avoid in a physical shop. My (Danish) experience is that the shops that provide the most useful information are the shops that avoid Flash and uses plain html pages (e.g. Amazon, smartguy.dk).

Flash-based sites almost always makes it impossible to add "I probably want to buy this" bookmarks in the browser, so a lot of items don't get bought by me. So even when the browser supports Flash, the site starts out with a significant handicap (looking at you, H&M) ... and I don't have the patience for the transition animations that most Flash developers think is a must-have.

markkanof• 16 years ago

There have been a number of occasions when I was glad to have Flash. A lot of restaurant websites are built entirely in Flash. Granted this really applies to my phone more than it does the iPad. Usually if I am looking at something on the iPad I can go grab my laptop for Flash, even if it is a pain. But having Flash on my phone has definitely come in handy.

I also ran into a problem with YouTube the other day. I couldn't find a video that I knew was there. Turns out it isn't available through the YouTube app, only on the regular website. Granted you could argue that is a complaint about YouTube, but if I had Flash on the iPad then I would just be going to the normal YouTube site and would not have experienced that frustration.

Basically I don't have a need for Flash on a regular basis. But there is still a lot of "legacy" content out there that is encoded in Flash and it would be nice to be able to access it.

loumf• 16 years ago

Other video sites besides YouTube aren't fully there yet. I randomly run into embedded videos on blogs that are using Flash to embed -- it's not always easy to find the HTML5 version. It's been getting better.

borism• 16 years ago

Google Finance?

astrodust3• 16 years ago

Why not Wikinvest? They have an app: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/wikinvest-iphone/

raganwald4• 16 years ago

I wish Dave would read and abide by "How to Disagree." The wisecrack about Gruber's minions takes a reasonable discussion and reduces it to Fox-Newsworthy labeling and ad hominem rhetoric.

People who agree with Gruber are cut from much the same cloth as people who want the choice of whether to run Flash.

drivebyacct27• 16 years ago

"People who agree with Gruber are cut from much the same cloth as people who want the choice of whether to run Flash."

Can't say I understand your sentiment. They are ideologically incompatible and driven by polar interests.

raganwald4• 16 years ago

In the wonderful Steve Jackson game "Illuminati," organizations have orientations like Conservative, Violent, &c. Conservative groups are aligned with other Conservative groups and opposed to Liberal groups, Peaceful groups are aligned with other Peaceful groups and opposed to Violent groups, and so forth.

There's also an orientation called "Fanatic." Fanatic is a special case because it is its own opposition. So Joggers, Trekkies, and White Supremacists are all opposed to each other by virtue of being fanatic groups.

Fnord.

sprout• 16 years ago

It would be a great start if Gruber would read it.

raganwald4• 16 years ago

I think I can hold my opinion and agree with yours simultaneously. Upmodded.

tjogin2• 16 years ago

Even if Apple wanted the iPad to support flash, how could they? A working mobile flash implementation does not exist, certainly wasn't even close to existing at the time the iPad was released, and the lack of it doesn't seem to have affected sales.

How could you possibly complain that the iPad doesn't support software that doesn't exist?

Let's postpone this discussion until when Adobe can show off a flash runtime that a) exist and b) doesn't suck. Is that too much to ask?

JoelMcCracken2• 16 years ago

When I see people jailbreaking their iPhones to support flash, and flash works well, then the community should talk. Can't agree with you more.

cjlesh• 16 years ago

Check out:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/07/how-to-install-flash-on-y...

jonknee4• 16 years ago

> Even if Apple wanted the iPad to support flash, how could they?

Give Adobe the green light to dust off their previous work and complete it. No one will make a serious effort at Flash for iOS before gaining approval from Apple.

tvon• 16 years ago

I think the idea is that the non-iOS Mobile Flash players are sub-par.

ergo98• 16 years ago

"A working mobile flash implementation does not exist"

EDIT The TL;DR; version is, at knowing acceptance of downvotes: denial isn't just a river in Egypt; It's also the clutchings of the Mac Faithful who are going to go down parroting the Flash rhetoric straight from the hands of Jobs.

Flash works brilliantly on my Nexus One for those few times I need to use it. I've used it to watch Escapist videos, to order a pizza at a local pizza place that inexplicably uses Flash for the entirety of their site, and on and on. 99% of the time it sits disabled, but when there's the little box and I actually want or need to see the content, I tap it and voila, a few seconds later I have it.

Of course not all Flash works (though I come across very little that doesn't perhaps because I consider it an emergency technology, not the foundation of my experience). Some instances rely upon keyboard input, or hover events, or other interaction mechanisms that I can't duplicate on my smartphone.

Which is exactly like many HTML sites (where keyboard, hover, and drag-drop functionality that can't be duplicated on a mobile device is often used. I've yet to find an HTML5 demo game that actually works). Do we say HTML is failed because not every site works perfectly on mobile devices? Abandon the whole platform and embrace the App Store?

drivebyacct27• 16 years ago

I agree, flash can work well. Google was foolish to not set the "Enable Plugins" to "On Demand" though.

ErikD• 16 years ago

Android phones support flash these days [1]. I have been told it works pretty good.

1: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/android-froyo-with-so...

napierzaza2• 16 years ago

I think it's less about whether Apple has Flash and more about how Gruber deals with dissenting opinions. I've seen him do hit jobs on bloggers for their opinion and small-time indy programmers for their design with no provocation.

pohl• 16 years ago

What qualifies as a "hit job" here? A dissenting post with a link? Isn't that what the "global conversation" on the world-wide-web is supposed to be all about?

avar2• 16 years ago

I don't own an iPad but I think Apple's non-support of Flash is great. It's shipping the first major web browser in the last decade that's explicitly not supporting flash.

So it's helping to make Flash more irrelevant every day, by forcing developers to finally consider that delivering their content in some executable binary blob isn't a reasonable thing to do on the web.

Thanks, Apple!

drivebyacct27• 16 years ago

Browsers don't support flash, the Flash plugin for a browser supports flash. It's not about the browser, it's about the platform or the operating system.

A Flash SWF is not an executable binary blob. Many parts of the SWF spec are even open.

schultzor• 16 years ago

Does the openness of the spec even matter when effectively only one party can write and ship a usable plugin for it?

astrodust3• 16 years ago

If by "open" you mean "approximately documented" then yes, it's open. There's a whole mountain of stuff you have to do to even meet part of the spec, and there's a lot left up to interpretation.

It's easier to write a fully HTML5 compliant web browser than it is to write a fully compliant Flash plugin.

jfno67• 16 years ago

The point Dave makes in the original post, is that he sees new flash content being produced, so the boycott is not working. I think it is more productive to focus on promoting html5 to make flash irrelevant.

avar2• 16 years ago

Of course sites are still going to produce content in Flash, but nowadays they at least have to consider that by doing so they're making it impossible for an ever increasing market segment to view their content.

I ran Debian on a PPC machine a few years ago so I couldn't use Flash. Back then only very odd setups like that didn't have it. Nowadays millions of people are buying new top of the line devices that don't support it, so the tide is turning as a result.

nanairo• 16 years ago

I think both systems together would probably work best. Because---and here I link to the original article---the fight is far from over.

If Flash will eventually disappear it will be slowly, very slowly. Companies are reluctant to get into new technologies. Has DVD disappeared because of Blu-ray? Has Windows XP disappeared because of Windows 7? What about Internet Explorer? And it's the same outside of the tech industry too.

Some sites will be early adopters, some will be slowpokes and most will be somewhere in the middle. And in this last year we've seen a _lot_ of mindshare being gained by HTML5. For a start Youtube, Vimeo and friends. Let's remember that a couple of years ago Flash was basically had the whole market by itself.

I don't know if the iPad/iPod helped, but I do know that Flash is starting to lose its grip. And yes, of course people will still develop on Flash for many years to come, the same way some companies were still selling VHS players a couple of years ago. But the adoption is gaining steam.

napierzaza2• 16 years ago

There's a lot of people who know flash and don't know HTML5 and not to mention HTML probably having some shortcomings.

So there's going to be stuff done in flash to appease the designs of sites. But once HTML is more mature, and people know how to use it, they're not going to do the work twice anymore.

Make no mistake, having a major platform like the iPhone/iPad is pushing that forward. It's hard to tell how or when this will turn out.

apu• 16 years ago

And making custom binaries for Apple products only is better?

astrodust3• 16 years ago

Making custom binaries for any device is better, Android, W7 or otherwise. A native application is always able to outperform a generic substitute.

Apple's non-support of Flash has forced content developers to put down their favorite hammer and explore other tools. It also forces content developers to port their applications and consider the format of the target device.

Microsoft has their XNA platform for Windows Phone 7, and I think that's a great thing, too, as it has been proven on the 360. You won't see direct ports from 360 to phone, it's too wildly different, but it makes developing easier. They're looking for high-quality native applications just like Apple.

If Windows Phone 7 supported Flash you'd just see thousands of trashy Flash games and most would barely work. The user experience would be terrible and people would get the impression that either the phone is slow or the apps are bad and not worth buying, either of which is a very bad outcome.

Like it or not, the walled garden approach is necessary to have some degree of control over the user experience. Other vendors will discover this if they care.

drivebyacct27• 16 years ago

"My perspective is that of an iPad user. I like the damned thing. But I feel like a pawn, and I don't like that."

I'm tired of seeing people complain about this. Apple has made their intentions clear from iPhone 1, day one. You are buying a read-only pass into the walled garden. If you don't like it, pick up a Galaxy Tab on VZW (arguably a better network) or wait for Motorola's dual core tablet later this year running the more tablet-centric Gingerbread. But cut it out complaining "as a user" about Apple.

Also: "Maybe if (hint hint) Gruber had comments on his blog, his minions wouldn't feel the need to vent on the sites he points to? Just a thought."

...this again? Really?

tjogin2• 16 years ago

Dave should be able to sympathize with John, given that he's deleted quite a few comments off of that page (no cussing either).

drivebyacct27• 16 years ago

What were the comments about? Why were they deleted? Critical of the author, content, etc?

mithaler• 16 years ago

Adding to that, by the time I clicked on the post, the comments on it were disabled.

Hey Gruber, what about the users?

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