When iOS was just starting out, many in the industry pointed at the lack of support for Adobe Flash as one of the key pain points that will hinder adoption of Apple’s new mobile operating system. What many failed to realize is that the only devices on the market that could even support Flash were ancient Nokia devices that ran Symbian and Flash Lite, meaning it wasn’t even full blown Flash. Promises were made by Adobe to port the complete Flash stack over to Android and make it perform as fast as it does on your desktop computer, but we’re only just now starting to see Flash becoming useful thanks to extremely powerful dual core processors in superphones and tablets. Most web designers out there with a pulse on the industry were smart enough to make their websites HTML5 compatible, which is another way of saying they wanted to support the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, but a few have been too damn lazy to crack open an O’Reilly book and learn some new skills.
Enter Swiffy, a new tool that was just launched by Google that promises to take your SWF Flash files and convert them to “an HTML5 version which will run in modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari”. Most of you aren’t going to use this, and even Adobe has updated their tools to produce HTML5 compatible websites/animations/videos after finally admitting that the “the Flash debate is over“.
Google rightly points out that tools like Swiffy show just how far the web had advanced, and that future web browsers will become even more powerful, possibly offering applications with the same sort of abilities that native applications have today. With Apple issuing updates to iOS every year and Google cranking out new versions of Android at a furious pace, we can’t wait to see what will happen to the browsers we all carry in our pockets.