Steve Jobs didn’t get everything right, but it would be hard for anyone at this point to question his decision to keep Flash off of iOS devices. Softpedia notes that YouTube has now moved away from Flash and has made HTML5 its primary technology for delivering videos, which marks a posthumous victory for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs that’s been years in the making.
FLASHBACK: Steve Jobs first started trashing Flash back in 2010
Why is this a vindication for Steve Jobs, you ask? Because five years ago Jobs penned a long missive about Flash in which he explained why Adobe’s online video rendering technology had no place on iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad.
It wasn’t just one thing about Flash that Jobs didn’t like — it was everything. He found that Flash was far too power hungry for mobile devices, it didn’t deliver reliable performance and was prone to crashes, and it also had “one of the worst security records” around back in 2010. He also said Flash was a pain for coders to use when designing mobile websites.
“Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices,” wrote Jobs. “If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?”
Five years later, it seems that YouTube has finally done just that using HTML5. It turns out Jobs was right about this all along.
