Occupy Flash movement is gaining traction

THE MOVEMENT to Occupy Flash software has gathered so much support in the last eight days that the people that run it are struggling, but managing to keep up with demand.

The initiative was born out of frustration with Adobe's plans to give up on the mobile internet and focus on its desktop application.

HTML5 is the preferred alternative to Flash and here it is seen as having a brighter and more determined future. The Occupy Flash web site, which sprung up around two weeks ago, has no kind words for the Adobe plugin and even suggests that Youtube users adopt the HTML5 version of that video sharing web site.

The web page, or manifesto, says, "Flash Player is dead", and offers a rather damning eulogy.

"Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn't work on most mobile devices. It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology," says the manifesto.

"Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don't use a desktop browser. It introduces some scary security and privacy issues by way of Flash cookies. Flash makes the web less accessible. At this point, it's holding back the web."

All this and more lead to the creation of the web site and the movement, said the organisers, who claim that the push came after Adobe revealed that it would no longer back the mobile version of the plugin itself.

"Our motivation was a combination of factors - Adobe recently made an announcement about the future of Flash, where they basically gave up on the mobile web but decided to go full steam ahead with the desktop web," said the group in an email to The INQUIRER.

"We felt the idea of splitting the web into two was not in the interest of the users of the internet. It seemed like a good time to start a conversation about the post-flash desktop web."

The 'conversation' is an impassioned one, and many people have added their support to the movement. The response has been better than the organisers had hoped, and they said that they believed that they must have tapped into a current that had been bubbling for some time.

"[The response has been] better than we could have ever hoped," they said. "The response has been amazing and mostly really positive. It seems we were able to give form to something a lot of people were thinking. Probably the biggest surprise was how fast this all took off - the site has only been up for 8 days as of this morning. We're doing our best just to keep up!" µ