Within 3 days Apple moved the web further forward than the entire industry has been able to in 3 years. Apple are infamous for dropping or changing vital elements to their products, often to the distain of its users, but they do it “for the greater good”.
Last week saw the release of the latest Mac operating system 10.7, or Lion. There have been quite a few blips raised as a result, notably the disabling of certain protocols for enhanced network security has left many with the inability to connect to NAS devices, something I had an issue with myself but quickly resolved with some tinkering. Mouse scrolling has been inverted, presumably the guy in charge of that was either a) a flight simulation junkie, or b) an first person shooter junkie like me who finds it more comfortable to invert the y-axis.
The most significant issue however has been with Adobe products with the reduced support for Rosetta leaving some aspects of older instances of the creative suite a little broken but the biggest story has been about Adobe Flash player. Those now using Lion will have found their system fans going into maximum overdrive when visiting Youtube and other sites using Flash player for video playback. Adobe released a statement within 24hrs of the release of OSX Lion claiming that Apple had removed the ability for them to use hardware acceleration to manage video playback causing over working of the CPU. This was quickly retracted, on Friday.
Despite all this negativity I have found that this manoeuvre has caused something to happen with far greater positive impact. My browser of choice is Google Chrome, I like the stripped interface, as a somebody who is daily building web pages the developer tools built in are fantastic, and it’s got the most support for modern web technology’s bar none (OK Opera actually has more support but it is yucky).
Google and Youtube have been pushing forward with html5 for some time now and introduced the html5 video player on Youtube for those with it available for quite some time. I have not been served a video with the flash player all weekend on Youtube. As other sites started to realise that there was a growing concern over performance on Mac they started swapping out their flash players for html5 also. The game going on between Apple and Adobe has made the web a better place and forced people to start updating and investing in their sites, this to me is a good thing.
There is too much talk in the industry about needing to persuade clients to start using progressive enhancement and current technologies; just this week I had to explain to one of our developers why there was rounded corners in one browser but not the other – a debate I thought I had seen the last of years ago. What Apple and Adobe have done proves a point I have been making for a long time. There comes a time where you should no longer offer a choice. People like choice but providing choice to some creates confusion and often disappointment.
It’s time to stop giving choices and go with your expert knowledge and if that is to use html5 video player predominantly and flash on IE only, then that is what you should be doing and the same goes for everything else. We will be sitting on html5 for a decade if we don’t start forcing it upon people, let’s be honest, it is only developers that know the difference nobody in the public actually cares.
Hopefully these actions will force Microsoft to speed up their web browser development but also look backwards at IE7 and 8 and decide whether it is possible to bring support into those browsers.