Apple's Secret Conspiracy Against Flash

Lover's of Adobe's Flash development environment were dismayed at a recent statement by Steve Jobs that Flash was a resource hog and that Apple had no intention of pigging out the iPhone.

Immediately, Flash fires erupted around the web as supporters came out of the closet (yes, that kind of love) and scurried out from under the rugs, declaring to one and all that Apple had a secret agenda.

Flash, you see, was the secret weapon that would allow bright and untarnished access to all of the worlds content, thwarting Apple's dastardly plan to funnel every precious byte of content through iTunes.

My take? Steve's right. Flash is a resource hog, on many levels.

And for that, and for other reasons, I do NOT want it on my iPhone.

First, let's make sure that we're discussing the same thing. Adobe Flash. The web browser plugin that powers YouTube and makes 99.9% of all of the "rich" internet advertising possible. The software with the 96-point-whatever percent market penetration.

That Flash.

Not Flash Lite, which, though designed for mobile phones, really only exists to allow phone makers to do pretty icons and animations. Something that the iPhone already does quite nicely.

No, if you're browsing the web with Mobile Safari and you hit a web page with a Flash intro screen, or come across some Flash-based mystery-meat navigation scheme, or if you just want to see embedded YouTube videos, you're going to need the real deal: Flash Player 9.

But Flash is, in fact, a resource hog. In many, many ways:

1) First, Flash is processor intensive. Open up the wrong set of web pages, and your processor usage will jump 20% just due to all of the animated bouncing ads. And that's on a Core 2 Duo, not the dinky little ARM processor embedded in the iPhone.

2) Flash is memory intensive. Watch as FireFox's memory utilization swells up like a ballon on a hot day as you browse the web. Worse, it tends to leak. And neither of those things will do at all when you don't have a couple of gigabytes of RAM to play with.

3) Flash tends to be unstable. I can crash FireFox and Safari relatively easily just by browsing the internet and leaving both applications open for extended periods of time. Turn off plugins, however, and suddenly both will go the distance, staying up until I download the next system update that needs a restart.

4) Flash is network intensive. Hit a web page with a plethora of rich internet ads, and suddenly you're looking at 200 to 300K, or more, of content. If one considers ads content. While that may fly on my 1.5mbps DSL line, on AT&T's EDGE network it... simply... won't... do.

Even on a full-blown desktop, there's a reason why Flashblock is one of the most downloaded FireFox extensions.

Worse, some developers are starting to use frameworks and technologies that add even more bloat. Flex, a "highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems" (to quote Adobe), adds 250K of code to a web-based application before you've even writen one line of your own.

I'm sure Flash is good for something. But I'm not sure what. And I've not really seen anything that one can't do with AJAX and other open web technologies.

Flash fanatics will no doubt cry foul (and probably fowl), while still claiming secret conspiracies. They even accuse Apple of being in cahoots with Microsoft of all people, banning Flash and opening the door for Silverlight, Microsoft's proprietary version of Adobe's proprietary technology.

Of course, Apple isn't about to put Silverlight on the iPhone either.

But still... and though I'm loath to admit it, there may be a sliver of truth beneath all of the conspiracy theories. Not about content or hardware access, as I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do everything Flash can do with Cocoa and the widget libraries. And not about forcing the entire world to hand their credit card number over to iTunes. And not about locking things down just for the sake of locking things down.

No, if anything it's that Apple would prefer —strongly prefer, in fact— that the internet stay open, and not become locked into a technology firmly under the control of a single company.

A scenario which almost came to pass in the glory days of Microsoft and Windows and IE. And even today, Apple and its customers are still dealing with the consequences.

And given that close call, I'm pretty sure that Steve is determined that it never, ever happen again.

Just take one look at WebKit and you'll see Apple busily supporting new and open technologies like HTML 5 and CSS Transforms and SVG. All of which will eventually make their way into Mobile Safari.

But Flash? The benefits just aren't worth the risks.

Comments

[James R. Taylor]

I use Safari and get so fed up with Flash ads that I usually turn off plugins, which then gets me in trouble when I want to see QuickTime movies. Apple should allow you to turn on (or OFF) plugins on an individual basis.

[Emanuele Cipolloni]

Hi David, finally, I'm not alone in the world of people that don't get that Flash != FlasLite, that memory bandwith for software-only renderers like Flash bring a portable device performance to its knees... I'm still very suprised that prople complain about lack of Flash on the iPhone and claim that their Web experience is diminished, but they actually skip (conveniently) over that fact that the 450 million of devices with FlashLite on board CANNOT access Flash web site either....

[Michael Tomlin]

Completely agree! I would rather not see Flash on the iPhone either. I actually removed Flash from Safari on my Mac and noticed how much more stable it seems to be and some pages load much faster as well.

(1) Just go to the "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins" folder
(2) Create a new folder, I labeled mine "Disabled"
(3) Move the Flash and Shockwave files into the new folder
(4) Relaunch Safari

If you have multiple users on your system, they can just copy those files into their "~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins" folder if they want Flash support.