Yet Another Chapter: Apple vs. Flash

"Earlier this year, the tech world was amused and aghast to watch the emergence of a public spat between Adobe and Apple. The subject: Flash. Flash is a plug-in for your Web browser that’s required to view certain Web animations (including those infuriating blinky ads), Web games and, above all, Web videos. If you want to watch TV shows on Hulu.com or the graphically rich home pages of thousands of other sites, you need Flash."

More in the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe, over, you guessed it, Flash. David Pogue is a respected technology columnist for the New York Times, yet he starts out by stating that "Flash is already built in to the web browser on your computer." Oops. The usual chapter and verse are re-hashed, and then come some interesting tidbits from the "Flash is Everywhere" camp. Many web sites have migrated to HTML5, but most (good, desirable) web content is still Flash. Almost all of today's generation of SmartPhones run Flash, except of course the iPhone, and most of them suffer from it. Reduced battery life, crashes, apps and games in Flash that were written really for keyboard and mouse, annoying web site content, ad nauseam. Steve Jobs is right, in this case, mostly. But, until HTML5 becomes ubiquitous (come on W3C!), there will still be a clamoring for Flash, no matter how badly it performs on mobile devices. Is a compromise possible?