Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead! Okay, maybe it’s not quite a celebration from that legendary scene from The Wizard of Oz, but Adobe’s announcement November 9 that it would be shuttering further development for mobile Flash should certainly be good news to Munchkins -- er, developers -- everywhere, not to mention much-needed relief for long-suffering end users forced to endure such tyranny on their mobile devices. Here are a few reasons why we won’t be missing mobile Flash.

In April of last year, Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs published a meme on the company’s website entitled “Thoughts on Flash,” which essentially laid bare Cupertino’s reasons for avoiding Adobe Flash on the iOS platform. The move was partly defensive -- it came at a time when competitors were quite loudly attacking iOS for its lack of Flash support, which ironically calmed down considerably in the year and a half since as more and more Flash developers started jumping ship to HTML5 instead.

The six reasons cited were the lack of openness, Adobe’s claims that Apple devices can’t access the “full web,” reliability/security/performance, battery life, touch and using Flash as a cross-platform development tool, which Jobs and Co. later backpedaled on, at least a little. But we came up with our own list of very good reasons why we won’t be missing the technology on our mobile devices anytime soon...

It Really, Really Sucks

Despite Android device makers’ claims that Adobe Flash brings you “the full web,” the reality is that mobile processors simply aren’t high-powered enough to keep up with the resource-hungry technology. Case in point: Our one and only favorite Android tablet, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, which ironically received its final feature update to Adobe Flash Player 11 as this article was being written. The otherwise wonderful Pulse News reader app screeches to a halt every time we try to play a Flash video on it. To be fair, the video does play (eventually), but it’s always a spine-tingling experience having to sit there and wait… and wait… and wait some more, time we usually spend by watching something on our iPhone or iPad instead.

It’s not like we don’t want to like Flash, after all -- whenever we see a young child poking around on the Sesame Street or PBS Kids website, for example, we feel a tug on the ol’ heart strings that make us want to give those Flash developers a big bear hug. But usually, it’s quite the opposite…

Flash Games: Scourge on Humanity?

Maybe we’re in the minority here, but we’d be just fine with seeing all those Flash-based games curl up and die a quiet (yet painful) death. Aside from being sheer brain rot, they waste good, otherwise productive hours of our lives. Unfortunately, many of them have since started to infest the HTML5 platform as well (and by extension, the App Store), and the fact that they continue to breed like flies means that people obviously love to waste their time and hard-earned cash on them, after all.

While the death of mobile (and television) Flash isn’t about to kill off the games developed on the platform, every little nail in Flash’s coffin can only be a good thing.

HTML5 Is The Future

“Adobe’s Flash products are 100 percent proprietary,” Steve Jobs wrote in his opening salvo on why Apple doesn’t support Flash for iOS. “They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.” (Of course, so is iOS itself, but that’s another argument for another day.)

We’ll still have to contend with Adobe Flash on our desktop and laptop computers -- at least until the world wakes up and realizes that Jobs was right and HTML5 is truly the better way to go. After all, what website is going to want to stick with Flash for desktop computers and then code their mobile version in HTML5? Open standards like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript could eventually pressure Adobe to wave the white flag of surrender on desktop Flash as well.

We Weren’t Missing It Anyway

If you’ve ever browsed the web on an iOS device and then switched back to a PC, you know how painful it can be. Suddenly, your browser windows are riddled with Flash banner ads, animation and other junk that mostly just serves to further slow access to the stuff you want to see in the first place. We don’t know about you, but we choose to use the excellent ClickToFlash extension on desktop Safari to hide that stuff anyway, and should we decide to view a particular Flash video (oh, the horror!), it’s just a click away.

Perhaps the ideal solution on iOS would have been for Apple to implement the same concept -- giving Flash huggers the ability to satisfy their craving (and watch Adobe’s code monster guzzle down battery and processor cycles like flesh-eating zombies in a shopping mall), but the fact of the matter is that most of us didn’t miss Flash in the first place.

There’s An App for That

Part of the reason iOS device owners didn’t miss Flash all that much was that the App Store created a far more viable place for services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and major television networks including ABC and NBC to offer their wares to the mobile masses. Sure, having Flash-based websites might cut down on the number of apps required to view all of this content, but we’re sure in time the pendulum will swing back toward HTML5-based websites, which will already be iOS-friendly.

In the meantime, for the occasional Flash video, there’s always App Store solutions like Skyfire Web Browser (also available for the iPad) to make the magic happen. Another option that’s absolutely free is Spool, kind of an Instapaper on steroids that can save Flash video for later viewing while making it viewable on iOS at the same time. Bottom line: We haven’t missed mobile Flash on iOS thus far, and we’re not about to start now.

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter

(Header image courtesy DC Comics)