Manifesto
Flash Player has been an important part of the web ecosystem for more than ten years now. It enables incredible improvements in user experience on the web, although it admittedly still has some flaws.
Until recently, Flash Player had a definite technical and functional lead over other market actors. This was due to Macromedia’s and then Adobe’s strategy who had chosen to work on it independently. Nobody can deny that it was part of its success if one compares Flash’s history with SVG’s.
But, hopefully this was only a first step in its history. Today, Flash and the web meet new technologies, new devices, and new users. Silverlight is now a serious challenger with a growing market penetration. Internet mobile users represent more than 70% of all Internet access. The web is changing. Open-source technologies highly help to change it and to change it quickly. Chrome, Safari, Mozilla open-sourced JavaScript engines and HTML 5 are now a reality on the web but also on mobile devices.
Facing this reality, more and more people find that Flash breaks user as well as developer experience. Given arguments are that Flash does not embed correctly in webpages. It does not support the Document Object Model (DOM), so one cannot change its content, its design, nor its behavior from within the HTML webpage without specific developments made in Flash itself. Why not change the way Flash and HTML work together by giving HTML more control over Flash from within the HTML page? For instance, even if the Flash Player nowadays runs almost the same language as JavaScript (Ecma 262), JavaScript cannot directly control Flash objects using DOM, yet more and more JavaScript developers want to use Flash’s capabilities in their projects.
Flash is often accused of consuming more CPU power than it really needs, seriously decreasing the battery life of mobile devices and increasing the Internet’s carbon footprint. A better integration into browsers, preferably as a native plugin, would help a lot in reducing its CPU consumption, as technical leads and Adobe evangelists mentioned several times in one form or another.
Also, if Flash was open-sourced, it would be part of the Open Web. All corporatism of the recent Steve Jobs speech apart, he would not have been able to say that Flash on Safari for Mac was not relevant compared to HTML5 as it would have been part of it.
Silverlight’s sources are closed and will probably stay closed forever. An open sourced Flash Player would also be a great argument for web publishers hesitating between those two technologies.
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