It appears that along with everyone else, (read: Apple) Adobe is finally making moves to abandon Flash as well. Adobe’s new tool, Edge, still encourages the same “flashy” content you’ve grown to love, except that if Edge does it, it’ll be CSS, Javascript or HTML5, not Flash. While it may be easy, or tempting, to call Edge a Flash-killer, Edge is not intended to put Flash out of its misery or even to encourage developers to switch over to HTML5, but rather open up a new development path while Flash development presumably hits a wall.
For the time being, there are a number of things Flash can do better than HTML5, which makes it an important part of the web, so it’s not going to completely disappear any time soon. Still, Adobe seems to be well aware that developers will eventually abandon Flash for HTML5 and while they don’t intend to expedite that process, they are doing what they can to grab a piece of the new pie.
At the moment, Edge is available, for free, to anyone who wants to see what it can do. The 1.0 version proper will probably launch sometime next year. While Edge is obviously still a very new tool, it holds promise for developers who are looking to move beyond the messy, messy world of Flash and users who are getting tired of not being able to view .swfs on their mobile devices because no one wants to deal with the messy, messy world of Flash. Even though Adobe is allowing Flash to continue kicking around, it’s good to see them with a horse in the HTML5 race. Here’s to hoping Edge can “cut” it, and Flash can slowly saunter off to pasture where it probably belongs.
(via ReadWriteWeb)
