Adobe Flash, in the Pan

Mobile Flash is being killed off. The plugin that launched a thousand online forum arguments and a technology standoff between Apple and the format’s creator, Adobe, will no longer be developed for mobile browsers, according to a note in Adobe’s financial briefing to analysts.

On the heals of a bombshell announcement like that, the first thing I thought was “Hmm, that makes sense, now that HTML5 can pretty much do everything that used to only be possible with Flash… furthermore, I bet Adobe takes it’s Flash development environment (an animation-friendly programming system that lets you create browser animations without having to write much code) and decouples it from the proprietary Flash engine, and reworks it into an HTML5 animation platform.”

Behold, I was dead on – say hello to Adobe Edge.

So, is Flash dead on the desktop? Not yet. Adobe has expanded Flash into a full-fledged application development and delivery system in the form of Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.

I would expect these Flash spinoff technologies to endure for quite awhile, but within about five years I expect that Flash (and Microsoft’s lame-duck competitor, Silverlight) will be much less prevalent in web browsers as presentation, animation, and multimedia duties are passed over to HTML5 and its successors.

Interested in taking Adobe Edge for a test drive yourself?  Download a free trial from Adobe Labs.