Why is this a surprise? Last year Adobe said the ICS version of the Flash plugin was the last mobile version they would ever make. Did everyone think it was just "wink-wink, only kidding"?
Really, what's the big deal. Flash may be ubiquitous today, but as support dries up, every flash site will move to HTML5 out of necessity. It isn't like there's going to be millions of users out there who can't access flash web sites. Those sites simply won't be flash anymore.
Seems Adobe is doing well enough to kill their own product off without the help of html 5 devs. There has to be a marketing twist here somewhere I'm not seeing.
[citation][nom]lemlo[/nom]Seems Adobe is doing well enough to kill their own product off without the help of html 5 devs. There has to be a marketing twist here somewhere I'm not seeing.[/citation]
They're already doing it with Adobe Edge: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ - which they've been working on for about a year or so, according to Wikipedia. Like rats, they can smell when the ship is about to sink.
Love it or hate it, Flash has played a huge role in the history of the internet. Because of the drop of flash support on mobile devices however this is going to be pain for websites to have to make mobile versions that do not rely on flash if they currently heavily do.
This not only effects phones but tablets,media streamers,e-books, even desktops if you have noticed many games on sites like pogo stopped working and now flash is more unstable as ever it's going downhill fast firefox 13+flash 11.3 =crash on desktops!.
I hope flash just dies and html5 takes over since it becomes more unstable with every build.
If you cannot use flash player, browsing the internet become difficult, buggy and frustrating. Try accessing your hotmail account without a flash player installed... good luck and be ready to swear a lot.