Did Adobe Blink?
October 22, 2010
The Apple vs. Adobe story as it relates to Adobe Flash has been told quite often. Apple has made it clear that it will not allow Flash on its mobile devices including the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. Then on Wednesday, it unveiled its new MacBook Air which also doesn’t allow Flash, at least not right out of the box. Users will need to manually install Adobe Flash onto their MacBook Air. Now, it looks like Adobe blinked.
It appears that Adobe is trying to get past this issue by giving developers a way to create HTML5 videos using a widget. Apple has long supported the HTML5 platform over Flash.
In a post on the Adobe blog, the company states:
HTML5 has received a tremendous amount of buzz, much of it driven by the potential for plugin-free video. However, the limited browser support for the HTML5 <video> tag has forced web designers to scramble for a solution that would work across platforms as well as browsers. To help customers overcome these challenges, Adobe has released an easy-to-use, totally CSS-customizable solution that shifts gracefully from the HTML5 <video> tag to the Flash Player when the tag is not supported. The shift takes place regardless of the screen—from phone to monitor to TV.The widget is available for developers either through Adobe’s Dreamweaver program or through the Adobe Widget Browser. For end users, this will mean access to more videos over time using our Apple devices.