Apple may tout the iPad as the best web browsing experience, but what about Flash? Love it or hate it, you can barely go through a handful of clicks before running into an Adobe-flash powered element.
Flash has been an important part of the web, and it'll be something that iPad won't have out of the box when it ships in late March. While the omission of Flash was excusable on the iPod Touch and iPhone, competing devices today run Flash, which makes the iPad omission even more glaring.
Adobe's Adrian Ludwig, the company's Flash Platform Product Marketing Group Manager, wrote in a blog post:
It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple's DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers. And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.
If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab -- not to mention the millions of other sites on the web -- I'll be out of luck.
Adobe and more than 50 of our partners in the Open Screen Project are working to enable developers and content publishers to deliver to any device, so that consumers have open access to their favorite interactive media, content, and applications across platform, regardless of the device that people choose to use.
