Adobe¡¯S Flash For Mobile Devices Laid To Rest

Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE) will be ceasing development of its Flash Player for mobile browsers, surrendering to Apple Inc. in the long run over a battle of Web standards.

The imaging software maker, instead, will be shifting its resources towards its Adobe AIR software and HTML5 based applications.

The decision by Adobe comes as the company said it would be slashing about 7 percent of its workforce, or 750 jobs, mostly in North America and Europe.

Apple's late CEO, Steve Jobs, derided Flash as the technology of the past. Jobs called it unreliable and ill-suited for mobile devices through an open letter last year. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/. Flash technology has been barred from use on all Apple's iOS devices.

Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform that is available as a plug-in for mobile devices to allow them to run videos and play games.

Adobe finally has conceded that HTML5 had become the preferred standard for creating mobile browser content. "Over the past two years, we've delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices," said Danny Winokur, Adobe's vice president of interactive development. "HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,"

"This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms," Winokur said in a blog post.

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, said? HTML5 is "the future of the web," because it allows video to run without separate plug-ins," in a blog post last year

The San Jose, California-based Adobe is adapting its products that use the increasingly popular HTML! 5 progra mming language and software, which Apple has supported.

"We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new?mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook," Winokur said. "We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations."

?Shares of Adobe are trading 8.3 percent lower at $27.91 at 2.59 pm EST on Wednesday.

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