Flash player

My 74 year old next door neighbor is not at all tech savvy and he knows what Flash is and knows from the news that the iPad doesn't have it.

Good for him!

Johnathan Burger wrote:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20006893-83.html

yep, Microsoft needs to keep supporting flash-otherwise how are hackers going to continue making a living 😉

Javascript! Its a great tool on it's own for XSS attacks, etc... Add some Ajax and you are golden! It's also great to snif internal networks. Just look up Pown to Own for a run down: basically the only browser not hacked out of the box was Chrome (so far). Also JSCon2010 had some nice talks about security issues in JS. The best part: Apple and Google are helping hackers run their malicious code even faster. The number one threat to security is the illusion of security: rule of thumb if it's online it can be hacked.

The lack of flash for the iPad is now starting to be a bit of an irritating chore.

There is a critical mass of websites used in everyday life which have flash. My gym's new website is all flash, so on the way there the other day I was unable to find out what time the classes started. I just went to an interesting link on the BBC Panorama website, to watch a short video - please download flash.

Either Adobe needs to quickly develop an acceptable working flash solution for mobile devices, or Apple needs to contribute some of it's billions made by selling these devices, to companies who need to pay for the redesign of their websites to remove flash content.

Or you need to complain to these websites about being incompatible with the iPad.

Tamara, I haven't received 1 positive response from any of the web-sites I've complained to. Just get stuff like 'it's something we may look into in the future if the iPad market grows sufficiently'.
I guess, in the general scheme of things, 3 million is a pretty insignificant number.

I'm amazed that they feel that way considering that there are over 100 million iOS devices accessing the web now.

The way I look at it, they obviously don't want my eyeballs with an attitude like that.

100 million? What's the breakdown on that? Figures I've seen suggest around 60 million for iPhones and 3 million for iPads. So, I guess there must be 40 million Touch users?
The thing is, with the iPhone and Touch, no-one (including me) was/is really bothered about no Flash, but the iPad is a very different case. 3 million isn't really that many to justify redesigning all Flash based web-sites. I mean what percentage of those accessing the web is that?

Exactly.

Considering the number of people who complain about the lack of Flash on the iPhone, websites that don't change are going to start losing significant numbers of eyeballs.

iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch operating systems account for 0.88% of operating system market share (source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8)

I think a lot of companies could afford to market to 99.12% of people able to view their websites in flash.

We'll see, but personally I doubt it. They'll just look at the sites on their desktops/laptops.
But, it's all conjecture on all our parts. Only time will tell.

Hmmm. Let's see. If all iOS4 has 0.88% then iPad - being 3% of the iOS market - has 0.0264%.
What chance of a change of heart there then? Presumably the other 99.9736% will keep them happy!

Don't be fooled by OS numbers, that includes business numbers where you aren't supposed to be accessing personal sites and home computers where people use their Windows computer with their iOS device. And, in a marketing database, with most people with an Apple product you are looking at people with a higher level of disposable income.

So if a site can ignore 100 million potential customers they must be doing very well indeed in this harsh economy.

Exactly!