Flash, Chrome and a Mole Hill

In case you haven't heard yet Adobe made a blog post today detailing a new partnership with Google. If you haven't already follow my link above and read Adobe's post - it is only a few paragraphs. I've already seen this news reposted on several open-source news sites and honestly I think it is great deal of fuss over something that ultimately won't matter much.

I have a few reasons for saying this, here is my train of thought on the topic:

1.) We are getting flash 11.2 as a normal browser plugin and then this version will see security updates for five years. A good deal of flash content doesn't break backwards compatibility (heck I still use flash 9.x on my N900 without issues), this means you have at least five more years of using flash in your browser of choice on Linux.

2.) I know, odds are you know it, heck even Adobe knows it - flash is going the way of the dinosaurs with regards to web technology. Does this mean we are going to have a flash free web tomorrow? No of course not. It does mean though that as new, better content gets created for the web it is less and less likely to utilise flash. Five years from now flash not existing for Linux could seriously be a non-issue.

3.) Worst case scenario: Flash doesn't die out and five years from now we all have to install Chrome when we need to access some poorly designed flash-based website. It would suck, but it would hardly be the end of the world.

So for now, lets not make a mountain out of something that very well appears to be nothing more than a molehill.

~Jeff Hoogland