Beginning of the end for Flash?

Steve Jobs famously would not allow Flash on his "iDevices" like the iPhone and the iPad.  It used to be a major annoyance.  It slowly became less important as newer technologies replaced it like HTML5 which does not require messy solutions like extra software.

You know, Plugins?

Flash has just been removed for Android.  Today, it no longer shows up on the Google Play store.   There is something called "Open Flash" that promises that it will play flash files on your tablet.

That means that effectively Flash is dead on phones and on tablets.  That's important because many people really could get away with only ever using a tablet to do their normal computing.

I found myself wondering whether it was a big deal or not.  I reached down and grabbed my tablet, swiped to unlock, then did a little digging.   It turns out that I never bothered to install Flash on the tablet.

At all.

Flash is on my Windows machines.   Flash is on my ancient hand me down Mac in the back room that is gathering dust.  I went through the painful install procedure to get Flash on my Linux machine. 

It's just not on the tablet or the phones.

I guess it's not going to make the transition to the "Post PC World".  It's always been a minor annoyance on Windows, demanding that it be installed if you go to Youtube to watch a video like the one below of a Golden Retriever in China guarding his owner's bike from being stolen. 

Totally safe for work, by the way.



So you can consider that as a test, I won't tell the boss.

Actually it will be nice to not have Flash on my Windows computers.   Flash is constantly demanding to be updated, almost as frequently as Adobe's other software, the PDF readers are.  It's at least once a week I get a notice telling me that there was yet another exploit that is being plugged by this particular update so please don't uninstall the software because we really do want you to use it.  

Now if we could only get Java to actually install correctly on an update, we might have a more pleasant experience.   I just can't seem to remember why I even keep Java on my machines...