Web browsers will eventually and need to stop using Flash, Mozilla vice president Jay Sullivan said in an interview Friday with Fast Company. He likened Adobe’s technology to a “plug-in prison” and expected that browsers like Firefox would eventually transition over to HTML5 to avoid dependence on one company’s app. He went on to say Flash was burdensome, primarily on mobile devices where the resources to use Flash weren’t necessarily worth the effort.
“Developers will switch over to HTML5, especially in mobile, where you can’t have Flash popping up on every page just to do some little animation,” Sullivan said. “The idea that you’d have to embed an entire instance of the Flash player just to play a 30 second audio clip? It’s crazy.”
He further acknowledged common knowledge that Flash was the most common source of crashes in Firefox and that HTML5 was the “longer-term answer” to a more stable browser. Firefox 4 has built-in plugin protection that’s known mostly as a safeguard to prevent Flash from taking down the entire browser when it crashes. Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome already have sandboxing meant with Flash in mind, even though Google currently has a partnership with Adobe that preinstalls Flash.
