Thoughts on a Flash-free Mac

In an apparent escalation of their war on Flash Apple has announced that Flash will not be automatically installed on all future Mac shipments. What’s interesting to me is just how much press I’ve seen on the issue today. While in the case of iOS this might be a problem due to no other way to install the product, for OSX I don’t see this to be much of a problem at all. In fact, in many ways it might actually be a very good thing.

Let’s look at a couple of facts. First, flash has been an annoyance to many internet users for a long time. It provides ads, multimedia, and other annoying experiences when browsing the web. Two, a large number of web developers continue to love their OSX.

What do these have to do with each other? Perhaps this will make more developers and designers wake up to the fact that flash is not always a great thing. In other words, maybe they’ll start using less of it.With the eminent dawn of HTML5 and other technologies Flash has become a dinosaur. Maybe this move by Apple will be one small step towards that dinosaur’s inevitable extinction. I know I sure wouldn’t miss Flash and many others wouldn’t either.

Of course, on the other hand this could just add one more obstacle to Mac owners, but I would rather think of this in a positive sense and therefore I believe it is one more positive step towards the death of Flash.