Even though Apple was right in the end, I think calling Apple "arrogant" is quite on the mark. It is they who denied opening up MobileSafari for 3rd party plugins (yet it supports 1st party plugins; in earlier versions you could even iterate the navigator.plugins property and see quicktime there). I remember seeing Adobe hinting heavily that they even had a working flash plugin (for jailbroken phones?) going internally. In fact, I think early Adobe Air applications targeting iOS shipped with an embedded flash player engine, until Apple started rejecting all applications "not compiled with apple-gcc from objective-c" and banning "interpreted code", so Adobe even went as far as writing an AS3 LLVM compiler, so that newer Adobe Air applications were compiled down to native arm assembly with no flash runtime present.
I bet the real reason for blocking flash player in Mobile Safari was to block all the flash based ad banners of the day. It would have degraded battery life and the user experience quite a lot.
> It is they who denied opening up MobileSafari for 3rd party plugins
...how is that arrogant? They wanted to only allow standard technologies? What is wrong with that?
> yet it supports 1st party plugins; in earlier versions you could even iterate the navigator.plugins property and see quicktime there
It had "quicktime" as a "plugin" but I believe that just launched the video player. Similarly, Apple replaced YouTube video embeds (Flash) with the video player. No plugins there.
> I remember seeing Adobe hinting heavily that they even had a working flash plugin (for jailbroken phones?) going internally.
Yes, Adobe did. It didn't work very well.
> I bet the real reason for blocking flash player in Mobile Safari was to block all the flash based ad banners of the day. It would have degraded battery life and the user experience quite a lot.
Flash period would ruin battery life. Similar to why iOS has no multitasking.
See for example http://web.archive.org/web/20130302154428/http://www.adobe.c...
I bet the real reason for blocking flash player in Mobile Safari was to block all the flash based ad banners of the day. It would have degraded battery life and the user experience quite a lot.