No Flash on the iPad?! What Steve Jobs Said
Shortly after unveiling the iPad, at a meeting with Apple employees, Steve Jobs spoke harshly about Flash.
According to the Apple chief, Flash is a real CPU hog, a source of crashes and security problems, and simply outdated technology. And the Cupertino company doesn’t support outdated technologies: it drops them from its products and offers more modern and efficient alternatives.
What Apple offers instead of Flash
As alternatives, Jobs named HTML5 and the H.264 video codec. In his words, they’re enough to replace Flash completely and get rid of the stability, security and performance problems.
But Jobs doesn’t seem to take into account that the HTML5 standard still hasn’t been finalized, and H.264 is a patented technology whose commercial use can be quite expensive.
The Apple chief also says that when a Mac crashes, Flash is most often to blame, and that nobody will use it in the future.
What it means for iPad owners
- Sites built entirely in Flash and Flash games won’t work in the iPad’s browser.
- Video will only play where sites serve it in H.264 (as YouTube does for the iPhone).
P.S. We’ll see how things turn out, of course, but in my opinion Flash support is needed: lots of sites use it one way or another. And browsing without Flash support has been uncomfortable for a long time.
The iPad video presentation
I think it came out pretty upbeat 
