The world went HTML5, finally Adobe are catching up!

Yesterday’s announcement by Adobe that they were abandoning Flash for mobile was greeted with almost universal acclaim in the tech blogosphere. Unusually, there weren’t many people surprised or disappointed by the decision. Why?

Well, It turns out that Steve Jobs wasn’t just being spiteful to Adobe by preventing Flash from running on the iDevices. It really was a poor experience for users and a limited and inflexible environment for content creators too.

Adobe have been edging towards HTML5 with the launches of tools like Wallaby and Edge. It now looks like they intend, like Microsoft, to fully embrace HTML5 and ultimately ditch their proprietary plugin technology entirely. Killing their mobile plugin looks like the first step to that conversion. It seems inevitable that eventually their desktop plugin will go the same way, as will Microsoft’s Silverlight, over the next couple of years.

More and more developers are choosing HTML5 as their RIA technology of choice, particularly as the web is increasingly extending from desktop to the mobile and HTML5 is the only ubiquitous choice. At Caplin, we have always been pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved in a browser with our Caplin Trader Toolkit, so it’s nice to see the world (and Adobe) finally starting to catch up!