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Rhodri Marsden

Journalist and musician Rhodri Marsden has been addressing common technology problems by stripping away the jargon and enlisting the help of readers in his Cyberclinic column in The Independent for the past two years.

Flash! Ah-ah! King of the impossible

Posted by Rhodri Marsden
  • Tuesday, 18 November 2008 at 01:06 pm
According to Adobe, the company who have been behind its development for the last three years, some 99.3% of desktop computers have Flash installed. We're all pretty familiar with the process; you visit a website, it tells you it can't display the content – but hey, it could if you installed the latest version of Flash, which it handily links to. You quickly install it, restart the browser, and bingo – your browser is now a willing receptacle for all kinds of content, notably YouTube and Google Video, but also a huge number other sites that employ it for navigation and animation. After all, if you're a website developer, and you know that nearly everyone visiting your site has some kind of Flash player installed, the temptation to make use of its vector graphics and video streaming capabilities is pretty irresistable.

But with more people accessing the internet on mobile devices, the ability to access all this Flash content is limited – and there's a battle quietly being waged to stop Flash having the dominance on mobile phones that it enjoys on computers.

Read more... )

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