Apple has been taking some heat for a long time now for not supporting Flash on iOS devices, and generally not supporting Flash on their platforms. Until recently I had thought that this was a small mis-step by Apple, but the more I use Flash the more I am starting to believe that their stance on Flash is completely correct, and that all the Android supporters touting Flash support may actually be hurting the Android brand.

Today I got the latest update to Flash automatically installed. After reading the changelog I was hopeful that Adobe had finally started to address some of the glaring performance problems of their Flash platform. They touted increased HD video performance and finally allowed Flash video to stay full-screened when on multiple monitors. But within five minutes of use I saw again why I have slowly started to hate Flash.

The first thing I did was start watching live.twit.tv, made the video full screen and opened up a new browser window as I always do. Then I started playing Zuma Blitz and the game was unplayable slowing to one or two frames per second. So much for increased performance of video.

My system has processing power to spare to handle simple things like full screen video and simple games. It is an over-clocked Core i7 running at 2.9Ghz with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon HD5750. But to be honest any modern system can handle this sort of work. A Pentium 4 system from a few years ago is plenty for video playback and some multi-tasking.

For me though the biggest indicator that Flash is the problem is that I can watch h.264, Windows Media Player, WebM or even Silverlight Video at 1080p full screen and do pretty much whatever I want on the other screen at the same time. Where as Flash can not even handle a low definition 480p stream from live.twit.tv.

Back to the original point though is that I actually un-installed Flash from my Android device two days after I installed it. It ran like a dog on my phone just like it does on my desktop. Lowered battery life and really does not provide any additional functionality that can not be reproduced in a better way using other technologies.

When companies are touting their Flash support so heavily in their advertising eventually it will start to hurt them. What does Flash provide Android that gives it an advantage over Apples iOS? Video? no, games? no, interactive apps? no. All it seems to do is fracture the Android platform a little more and lowers performance of the devices.

Most end users do not care about Flash or Java or Objective-C, all they will notice is when their Phone seems slow, and when it dies after a few hours of use. Pushing Flash so heavily as a main feature on all these new Android devices will start to hurt Android as users start to realize that Apple products run faster and have longer battery life even when they are running similar hardware.

What struck me the most today though was the realization that I really can not un-install Flash from my system without crippling a lot of my internet experience. I recently installed a Flash blocker plug-in for Chrome and it really is amazing to me that nearly every site I visit has several flash elements on the page. For simple things like file up-loaders, animations but mostly Ads.

In short I think that Apple’s stance against Flash has really helped open up the web, which is a very strange thing to say about Apple. But just image in Apple had supported Flash or even allowed it on their platform from day one. Would h.264 or even WebM video streaming be developed so heavily to the point where they are now maturing to hopefully become the norm. I think h.264 and WebM would still exist but would not be as important as they are turning out to be now.

The day when I have the choice to remove Flash from my computer and still view video on the web and not cripple the interface on many sites I visit, will be a day I am a happier man.