back to article Android's Chrome finish comes too late for Flash coating

Google may have got its Chrome browser running on Android, but Adobe is standing by its decision not to port Flash to any new mobile browsers, not even Chrome. Flash content works fine in Android's embedded browser, and Adobe has previously said that it will be porting Flash to Android 4 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich), but that port …

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  1. Tom Chiverton 1 Silver badge

    Mobile FireFox is certainly planning to support Flash as long as your device does...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      and..

      Opera Mobile already does, and uses hardware acceleration in the process, making it easily the fastest mobile browser by a mile.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Just a shame Firefox Mobile is a bloaty piece of crap!

    3. Ilgaz

      Better

      They should support the majority of android devices, the ones with less RAM and they should support non broadband connections.

      Opera, a commercial browser with business interest did the above for profit and succeeded. An open source browser became something as the most elitist one among others. Even Ms will add compression to their next internet explorer since they figured 3g on entire planet won't happen.

      On the other hand, Mozilla seriously discuss dropping support for xp etc and they don't support any android which isn't high end. What really happened to them?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    FUD

    As clearly flash runs fine on ICS already, so any changes to make it work on Android Chrome browser will be minor API hook and plugin wrapper tweaking by Google.

    Expect a beta of Chrome that supports the existing flash plugin API, or a recompiled (or included) Flash plugin compiled by Google very soon.

    Still nice try at FUD, it's not bad, I would rate in 4/10.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      FUD

      Fact

      Unsettles

      Droid fan

  3. spencer

    Alternatives like Silverlight

    ...which doesn't work on Linux :-(

  4. jai

    Flash - fast going the way of the floppy disk and 8-track drives

    1. NogginTheNog
      Thumb Up

      Yeeharr

      And bloody good riddance!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        What?

        It's good for funny little games.

  5. Jim Coleman
    Meh

    With the advent of HTML5, why is FLASH even still on teh interwebz?

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Because there are still no standards for audio and video output and no copy protection on them. Additionally, < IE 9 can't handle SVG for scalabe, zoomable images. You can blame Microsoft for that.

      1. Giles Jones Gold badge

        Flash isn't a standard, it's proprietary and there's no published standard for it so that anyone else can implement it.

    2. Matt 75
      Thumb Down

      because

      because HTML5 is not - and was never intended to be - a replacement for Flash?

    3. Irongut Silver badge

      Because HTML5 does not exist. It's just a proposed standard that everyone and their dog seems to be rushing to claim is integral to their browser / app / device but really it's pretty much vapourware atm.

      1. Giles Jones Gold badge

        It does exist and is in use:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#Popularity

        1. Malcolm 1
          Stop

          Even that link shows that HTML5 is incomplete standard. Of the 30 technologies mentioned, only two and a bit warrant "W3C recommendation", seven and a bit are candidate recommendations, and the majority of the remaining 20 or so are still working drafts:

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HTML5-APIs-and-related-technologies-by-Sergey-Mavrody.png

          Some of the technologies are in use, but suggesting that HTML5 as a whole is any more than marketing hype at the moment is just a fallacy.

  6. JDX Gold badge

    re: why is FLASH even still on teh interwebz?

    If you read the article you'd have one reason - DRM and other content protection/licensing.

    The other thing to remember is that streaming video is only one use of Flash... and in fact is only a tiny part of what Flash does. For instance Flash is the ONLY cross-browser way to do accelerated 3D rendering.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      FTFY

      "For instance Flash is the ONLY cross-browser way to do accelerated 3D rendering *at the moment*."

      1. ThomH

        And presumably then only if we discount Shockwave. Though there's a tree falls in the woods argument to be made on that one, I think.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      "Flash [...] accelerated 3D rendering."

      That is a joke, yes?

      Here, you forgot the icon.

      (yes I've had a project using Flash 3D "acceleration")

  7. Gil Grissum
    Pint

    PHOTON

    The Photon Browser for iOS supports Flash. So I can watch Flash content on m iPhone 4S. A pitty Adobe is dragging it's feet supporting Flash on ICS. LOL Kind of ironic, don't you think?

    1. ThomH

      But I take it what they mean by "[it] supports Flash player for iPad and the browsing of Flash websites by streaming these sites from servers in the cloud" is that there's an Amazon-style proxy network doing the grunt work? It would be understandable if Adobe had simply decided not to go down that route.

    2. BRAINPLAN
      Facepalm

      actually

      Flash works works fine - and natively - on ICS, I don't know what you are talking about.

      It's flash for the beta version of chrome browser on android 4.x + that doesn't work, and that is because adobe don't want to develop it further.

  8. mark jacobs
    Coat

    HTML5?

    Believe you me, HTML5 has a very long way to go. At least Flash can buffer a video properly. Judging by Vimeo's site, HTML5 has yet to achieve that. I patiently buffered a 10 minute HD video with HTML5 to find that I could not jump around the same way I could with the Flash equivalent. As far as vieo quality was concerned, they were the same - HD. To write off Flash now is premature and immature!

    1. alexh2o
      Thumb Up

      Well said! No one argues Flash will die... but why people demand it's death NOW when no suitable alternative actually properly exists is nuts!

    2. Ilgaz

      At least you have seen one

      Wondering around with opera mobile which has video support and google android browser, I haven't seen any page using the so called html5 video.

      As a person from TV industry I know couple of producers who would be outraged when they hear freely ripped videos (as in easily) and people skipping ads.

      Things were going slightly fine until this h264 fight happened and google came up with their format.

      Remember everyone hated animated gif and somehow animated png didn't get enough support? What happened as result? Gif lived on, ads lived on.

      Industry doesn't want non technical user to skip ads, millions of dollars at stake, they are already paying insane amounts for bandwidth. So, what happens when hippies reject? They keep flash alive.

      Google etc should really learn the media industry before proposing executives to trash billions of dollars in investment to standards like h264/mpeg. In industry, everything (including Sony devices) are tied to some industry (not single entity) standard.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Excuse me, I'm lost

    "Adobe [...] would prefer to see the world moving to more open standards for playback."

    Excuse me, evidently my last teraport went horribly wrong and I've ended up in the wrong universe - Adobe in my universe created the non-standard, not-open playback plugin.

    Would you happen to know the local fine structure constant, and can you tell me if you've seen black holes matching these descriptions, and what the displacement vectors are to them?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. brym

      Adobe created what?

      Appears that even in your original universe, you were wrong. Adobe didn't create it. They bought it from Macromedia. Read The Reg much?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Adobe just realised they can slip in their tech into the HTML5 standard without too much problem (CSS shaders comes to mind).

    They also figured this way they can convince people to upgrade to a newer - and very expensive -

    HTML5-supporting Adobe development suite.

    Bet they're still kicking themselves for not realising this sooner.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      AC @ 18:47 Hit Nail on Head

      I've worked for 3 fortune 500 companies over the past ten years and the only reason they bothered with upgrading their CS licenses was for the Flash IDE (mostly for training delivery/development). Most reg commentators just don't get it. Adobe couldn't care less about video delivery over the player. They don't make any money off of it. It's the IDE they make money off of. And the trouble Adobe is facing is that (like photoshop and illustrator 6 years back, and much like Word and Powerpoint 10 years back) is that Flash is nearing maturity at this point. Flash isn't dying, Adobe will continue to support it as a niche product; but heck yeah, Adobe is more than eager to jump on the 'Canvas' bandwagon, that way they can sell tons of more pointless CS updates featuring the latest 'Canvas' development IDE, "Muse" or whatever they decide to call it in the end. All of this Flash bashing by the "open source" idiots is so misguided it's ridiculous. But there's no reasoning with the herd, so I hope you all enjoy your infinitely slower, buggier, and security-hole ridden canvas enabled browsers for the next few years folks, because we all know how much more open and smooth things are going to go with MS and Google pointing fingers at each other regarding responsibility for rich media delivery.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Flash is slowly dying...

    Flash on mobile?

    It's either video, or browser based flash games that probably don't work too well on small touch screen devices.

    Flash is on it's way out - it's a slow death, but inevitable.

    For some time, it will still be the platform for very rich media online, but slowly but surely it will become possible to do anything in HTML5 / Javascript that could be done in Flash.

  12. Gavin Ayling

    Samsung Galaxy S2

    Does anyone happen to know why the new browser is not compatible with the Samsung Galaxy S2? I'm such a geek that I got excited only to have my excitement dashed!

    1. Stephen 10

      S2 not ICS as yet

      And chrome for android is only for Android 4 onwards. When Samsung update you'll be supported.

  13. P. Lee
    Paris Hilton

    Mobile = tablet?

    Does anyone watch video on a phone-size screen? Yuck! You may as well give the content away for free at that resolution - just include the odd advert. It isn't worth finding pirate versions for a rubbish product. I'd rather see flash killed at source (server) rather than the client though.

    What useful DRM is flash providing? I record everything to mythtv, but use catchup-tv as a backup as sometimes I get delete-happy. The adverts are so short its hardly worth skipping (I'd get the timing wrong) on catchup-tv so I'm happy to not skip them. If I were going to pirate, I wouldn't be pirating the catchup-tv stream, I'd be looking for someone who has taken a feed from the telly or DVD.

    Finding free stuff on the net is so easy there's little point trying to DRM if DVD/BD's are available or it has already been broadcast.

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