Steve Would Be Proud: How Apple Won The War Against Flash
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Can't wait to tweak my HTML5 for all permutations of OS and browser! Hooray!
In THEORY flash is a cross platform tool to provide a uniform experience, and allow for rich content on all platforms.
In PRACTICE flash is a cpu/gpu hog which has more bugs than IE, and while flash's performance will probably always top that of native browser apps (AS's static compilation is key here) it cannot be as good as native apps. On the HTC EVO I have not been able to run ANY flash program, EVER, successfully. The best I got is a few seconds and the biggest battery drain I ever saw. TL;DR - flash for android is just a security risk and space waster with no benefits. I uninstalled it because I have root and never been happier.
In practice, to make any other native or not dev plat do what flash does on mobile will hog the cpu/gpu just the same because, simply put, there is no magical free lunch processing. In practice, only native can touch it and in most real world situations that is only done with time costly tweaking that in the end can't really surpass its performance other than mostly synthetic optimal situations.
If you run non optimal coded apps made in whatever dev plat, you will get drain. That is possible to be done with flash apps. It's a developer problem.
As for flash having more bugs than IE, add some links for reference, I would love to read up on that.
Then I would recommend starting with Secunia's Advisory and Vulnerability Database and NIST's National Vulnerability Database.
Both list hundreds of vulnerabilities, nearly all of which are severe or critical; several of which interact with IE specifically; and most of which affect all platforms, including Android, Linux, and OS X.
Although IE has about 5 times as many vulnerabilities listed (3x in Secunia and ~5x in NIST's NVD), I think the point remains: Flash is one of the largest security threats on the Internet, especially considering its spread and profile.
Additionally, Flash still suffers from thousands of bugs, some of which have never been fixed (like "smurf video" on Linux). And that's just on their public (https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/) bug database.
Look, the article on techcrunch is troll bait and the agenda is meme based already, the article title brings to ponderation on the amount of self satisfaction a corpse would feel because a company pulled a virtual machine from running on mobile browsers, limiting it to export to executable apps that are doing well by any measure. I don't see a valid way to continue this other than pointing back to what I posted.
I would say cross scripting is the largest security problem nowdays by any measurable account. These are your parameters looking at spread and profile, javascript tops flash in both, so let us not make it sound like flash is the end all of security problems on the web.
You don't "like" it, perfectly fine, no big deal, I reckon you probably interact with it on a lot of plats nowdays without even knowing. Bandwagon opinions aside, it is that simple.
The only result of pulling Flash-in-browser from android is that people will compile games with AIR, which they're already doing because it's a better business model. Unfortunately what this has always meant for iphone users is that only games Apple is willing to sign off on are available to them, unless they want to play a crappy HTML5 version. But fanboys are always looking at the bright side.