What’s Popular Now Must Always Remain Popular, Right?

So Tom Arah made an argument that, because Flash is popular now — installed on 97 percent of web browsers in use, by one count — it will always remain popular, and “should eventually become the natural cross-OS and cross-browser web platform for devices, just as it is for the desktop.”

Chris Pepper responds:

People who are aware of this struggle understand that h.264’s recent growth has largely been at the expense of Flash video, and because iOS doesn’t support it. If the iPhone and iPad supported Flash, we’d be watching (or trying to watch) videos in Adobe’s broken mobile Flash player.

We, as an industry, are either stuck with Flash forever, or it will go into decline because of one or more popular platforms that do not support it.

★ Wednesday, 22 September 2010