The Skyfire browser
already supports Flash.
It might come as a surprise to many iPhone owners, but even before Adobe's announcement that their popular Flash platform was coming to many smartphones, including Android, BlackBerry, Palm's webOS and Symbian, the iPhone's Safari browser was not the best mobile web browser on the market, at least not in terms of technology. That distinction goes to Skyfire, a mobile web browser running on Windows Mobile and some Symbian S60-based phones.
Skyfire may not be as user-friendly as the iPhone's Safari browser, but it is capable of viewing Adobe Flash content and displaying streaming video. Skyfire achieves this by rendering the pages on a separate server and then sending them to the browser. And while this might sound like it would add a delay to getting the web page, it actually speeds the process since it allows the phone to use rendering technology far beyond its capability.
And with Adobe Flash coming to other platforms, iPhone customers are seemingly falling behind the technology curve in the smartphone market. Adobe did announce that Flash apps will come to the iPhone via the app store using a new tool that will convert them to native iPhone apps, but this is limited to stand alone applications that do not interact with the web.
Is Apple holding out for HTML 5?
Why no Flash for the iPhone? Simple. Apple is sticking to its guns and demanding Adobe create a Flash client that is both easy on resources and heavy on features, which rules out Flash Lite, Adobe's lightweight model of Flash.
But Apple may very well see Flash as an unneeded bridge to the future. Once HTML 5 becomes standardized, middleware platforms such as Flash may become irrelevant. While the feature set for HTML 5 is still up in the air, heavyweights like Apple and Google are pushing for high end features that are aimed at building robust web applications.
If some of these higher end features are approved and become standardized for HTML 5, middleware platforms like Adobe Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight could become obsolete.
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