14 DAY TRIAL // Along with the unveiling of the new Flash Player 10.1, which will be coming out early next year, Google has announced it will be joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, which aims to bring a unified web experience to all of the different types of Internet-enabled devices. Flash Player 10.1 will be the first release to bring full support for the Flash technology to mobile devices across several platforms including Google's Android.
“We're excited to be joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, an initiative established a year and a half ago to help developers more easily design content for the web across multiple screens using the Flash Platform,” Bill Coughran, Senior VP of Engineering at Google, said. “We've always believed that open platforms lead to greater innovation on the web and we see participating in the Open Screen Project as another step in that direction. We're excited to continue working with the teams at Adobe on pushing the web forward and to see where the next generation of web development will take us.”
The Open Screen Project wants to create a unified experience across mobile and desktop platforms. By getting all of the hardware manufacturers on board Adobe hopes it will make it a lot easier for developers to write an application that is guaranteed to run on any platform their website may be viewed including the myriad of mobile devices as well, ensuring that there will be more content available for mobile users.
But this benefits the user as well in several ways. First, mobile users will now be able to get the full advantages of the technology and will be able to view the websites like they were intended. At the same time, by freeing up developers from having to create several versions of their websites and apps for different platforms it will potentially allow them to dedicate more time to actually developing and improving their app.
While Google has now expressed its support for Adobe's technology, its interests may be a little conflicting in several areas. The search giant now says that it has made use of Adobe Flash in many of its products ranging from YouTube to its search engine. What it fails to mention is that it's been very reluctant to do so and most of the “collaboration” between the two companies had to do with Google implementing support for Flash, like in Google Chrome or the search engine's ability to crawl Flash content, but less with the search giant actually making use of the RIA platform.
In fact, with its great support for HTML 5, which aims to replace many of the capabilities of the Flash technology with open alternatives, Google is pretty much going against Adobe. Still, at least for the moment, Flash dominates the web and that is unlikely to change in the short term future so Google didn't have much of a choice but to get behind the Open Screen Project especially since it meant that its Android mobile platform would be able to one-up Apple's iPhone, which still lacks any kind of Flash support.