Skip to main content

National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal kill Flash

In addition to new AppStore software, NPR and The Wall Street Journal plan to develop the versions of their web sites specially for iPad users, the main feature of these versions will be a total absence of Adobe Flash technology.

NPR and WSJ will make over at least some parts of their web sites for Apple tablet specially, however the content will be the same and iPad-specific sites will run simultaneously with the traditional versions of these resources.

MediaMemo writes that visitors of the iPad-version of the WSJ site will see the first page of the newspaper converted for the tablet i.e. without Flash. But those who click further into the web site will see the pages that haven’t been converted. IMHO, they should notify about such things as possibility to find yourself on the page unconverted for the iPad in order to prevent users from ‘getting a blue brick’ instead of Flash-banner or video player.

The Wall Street Journal is sure it will overcome the iPad’s engineering constraints and get through the assigned task. Concerning NPR, their site structure itself enables inventing a good alternative to the traditional resource. The company has already held talks with their sponsors and obtained their agreement for the change of advertisement banners for those which don’t use Flash. So, in all probability, other major resources will follow the example of WSJ and NPR.

As we can see Adobe is infringed more and more. As the exclusion of Flash from the iPad and following comments attributed to Steve Jobs, who allegedly called the Web standard a “CPU hog,” have resulted in a considerable amount of debate. Now, the company has nothing to do but to start an active collaboration with Apple’s rivals, for example, with Microsoft, and together with them to develop a tablet with video and other top-level graphics representation.


»