Is Flash No Longer Necessary?

This week Steve Jobs of Apple published long open letter on Flash in which he goes over all the reasons why Apple does not support flash.

This letter goes through 6 reasons why they have decided not to use flash.

Here is a short list of what was said.

• Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe along with their future enhancement, pricing, etc.
• Almost all the videos are available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.
• Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009.
• H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
• Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.
• We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

If you would like to check out the full letter click here.

Looking over this list there are few good points but also couple really bad ones. I understand the battery life, that is very important with the smart phones, no one wants to have a 5 hour phone. As far as security I disagree, I have been using flash since it first came out and I have yet to have an security issue. No one really watches flash videos anymore, that’s why there is YouTube. The whole thing about flash being proprietary, which business isn’t, Apple? Issue of the mouse rollover, that is not the Flash problem that is Apple developers problem, due to the fact that they have to figure out how it works. So overall in my opinion I think this letter is pretty useless and full of excuses. Me as a user would like to see flash on it just because most of the major websites are created partially using flash, so it is a inconvenience to me as a apple iPhone user.

Let me know how you feel about this.