Mozilla: Adobe threaten openness
Thursday 15th May, 2008 (Playgroup blog)
Speaking at the Internet World Exhibition in London, Mozilla's Tristan Nitot expressed concerns over media plugins for your browser. Applications such as Flash from Adobe and Microsoft's Silverlight were called into question. Nitot explains: "You are producing content for your users and there is someone in the middle deciding whether users should be able to see your content".
I have never thought of Flash, in particular, as threatening the openness of the web as so many users have it installed but Nitot claimed that both Adobe and Microsoft have a history of poor support for 3rd party browsers. To support his claim Nitot cited the lack of Internet Explorer on Mac/Unix systems and Adobe's slowness in it's attempts to update its Linux version of Flash.
Nitot: "If you consider proprietary technologies, think hard; are you really trading convenience in the short term with independence in the long term?". Something we should all be thinking about really. However with the advancements in the JavaScript field, spearheaded by Google, and the Web 2.0 movement there is emerging a real alternative to using Flash for websites that require lots of user interaction.
Tags: Mozilla, website, Adobe, Microsoft, Flash, Silverlight, internet, openness, Linux, Unix
