Virgin America site drops Flash to court iPhone

[samh004]

I thought this was an interesting read this morning. Seems Virgin America has decided Flash is useless on their website because it works differently on customers systems, and they don’t use it to it’s full extent anyway (and I look over to Qantas using it to display pricing graphs).

Virgin America late Tuesday said it has dropped Flash altogether from its website. The change, which quietly took effect Monday, instead just uses newer web technologies like CSS. The airline explained the move as a deliberate gesture towards the iPhone and other handhelds, as the previous dependence on Flash kept most mobile hardware from checking into flights and favored certain devices over others. [Link]

It’s interesting to note that while their new site is touted as Flash-free, certain areas like route maps still rely on Flash, and an upgrade to their check-in kiosks will see them using a touch-input-based flash system. But for the most part, you can use their site on your iPhone/iPad and not worry about problems booking flights and such.

Also, The Register article.

 

[anat0l]

The more that the world can move away from Flash, the better.

 

[tuppaware]

It is a dirty technology really. Long live HTML5 (until the next web 3.0 hyper gen y comes along )

Btw - the virgin america site did look shíte before the change.

 

[Homer]

Careful...you'll all be accused of being Apple fanboys . I happen to agree with you about Flash, but when I forwarded a link to that story to a friend of mine he shot back with scathing criticism of "Apple-advocates" and Steve Jobs' apparent desire to ruin Adobe, etc.

As an iPhone user I've never once missed having Flash on the device and as the iPhone is, I believe, the dominant mobile browsing platform, the market as a whole also seems to be deciding that Flash is unnecessary on mobile devices.

But you just can't tell some people...

 

[anat0l]

It's not that anti-Flash = pro-iPhone, but Flash is not reliable technology.

It is memory intensive, it leaks, it is slow technology, and it is security-vulnerable.

The only real trade off is that it is relatively easy to code a program in Flash. CSS has its own little thorny quirks (case in point: CSS tables for layout vs. <table> directives).

 

[Homer]

It's not that anti-Flash = pro-iPhone, but Flash is not reliable technology.

I agree with you and I didn't mean to infer that. I know personally of a handful of software development organisations that use the lack of Flash support on the iPhone/iPad as part of their dismissal of everything Apple. In addition there is a fair bit of Adobe versus Apple discussion in IT generally at the moment and most of it centres around Apple's continuing decision not to support Flash on its mobile devices. In my opinion the popularity of the iPhone helps to justify Apple's decision not to support Flash, which was the point I was trying to make.

 

[anat0l]

I agree with you and I didn't mean to infer that.

Sorry my stating what I did was more to reinforce your point, and further point out the shortsightedness of your friend.

 

[drewbles]

Absolutely true and I didn't mean to infer that. I know personally of a handful of software development organisations that use the lack of Flash support on the iPhone/iPad to dismiss everything Apple. In addition there is a fair bit of Adobe versus Apple discussion in IT generally at the moment and most of it centres around Apple's continuing decision not to support Flash on its mobile devices. In my opinion the popularity of the iPhone helps to justify Apple's decision not to support Flash, which was the point I was trying to make.

This is also similarly true to the browser situation. There are still far too many 'developers' (and I use the term very loosely) who will refuse to make a website work in anything but Internet Exploder.

You would hope that the popularity of Firefox and other smaller browsers would help developers conform to standards, and design a website that works in any browser. I seem to recall something nasty called Front Page Extensions. This took it even further. Initially, they only worked on IIS Servers and no Apache/Linux server supported them. Use Frontpage to design your website with 'funky' flashing and blinking text stuff? Not using IIS with Front Page Extensions? TOUGH!. Fortunately, that died off pretty quickly

 

[anat0l]

This is also similarly true to the browser situation. There are still far too many 'developers' (and I use the term very loosely) who will refuse to make a website work in anything but Internet Exploder.

A more recent shortcoming is failing to design mobile-friendly websites.

This involves sticking to W3C as close as possible as well as offering mobile-alternative websites (with hopefully equal key functionality to the full version and with a few kilobytes of page load data rather than a few megabytes!).

 

[serfty]

I just luuurve Flashblock ...

 

[drewbles]

I just luuurve Flashblock ...

+1

Was the thing I missed most when I moved to Safari. Since then i've sorted it out, but it's brilliant

 

[YQY]

I just luuurve Flashblock ...

I love NoScript - it blocks javascript, flash etc - by default it blocks everything.

 

[oz_mark]

Bring on silverlight I say.

(gotta love technologies that don't exactly set the world on fire!)

 

[Homer]

Bring on silverlight I say.

(gotta love technologies that don't exactly set the world on fire!)

I'm a fan but alas, relating back to the title of this thread, that won't run on the iPhone (or iPad) either...

 

[Mal]

Both Adobe Flash and Apple iPhones/IPad are evil products. I just can't work out which is worse.

My pet peeve with websites is how they're all moving to Web 2.0 type "standards" and lose a lot of functionality just so they can look good to a web developer. One of the websites I use a lot (National Rail in the UK) had that occur and the website is now less functional, more buggy and nearly every task takes longer to achieve.

 

[tuppaware]

Careful...you'll all be accused of being Apple fanboys ..

Let me think about that. I own an ipod/iphone/macbook/macbook pro 15", a 20" imac (I had an apple tv)

At work I have on my desk a 27" Imac - and an 8 core macpro at my feet ... (and a small HP dc7700 desktop for outlook - as I dont like using entourage )

 

[notzac]

My pet peeve with websites is how they're all moving to Web 2.0 type "standards" and lose a lot of functionality just so they can look good to a web developer.

Blame the coughpy developer - not the standard! I can think of two sites near and dear to my heart (or at least, two that I have to interact with on a v regular basis for work), both designed with web standards in mind - one sucks mightily, one is wonderful.

(and a small HP dc7700 desktop for outlook - as I dont like using entourage )

This is rapidly running away from the topic; however, using Outlook on a Windows PC? For at least myself, Mail.app (along with Address Book and iCal) work very nicely together to keep my e-mail and schedule in order. If you connect to an Exchange 2007 server, it all just works as well.

Am looking forward to see what the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft manage to come up with for Office 2010:Mac (which is supposed to have a full-blown version of Outlook) - that being said it'll be a pretty tough sell (for me) just for e-mail.

Back on topic just for the moment -- has anyone actually tried using the Virgin America site from an iPhone? It's pretty and all, but completely impractical to use. Given that you can use all different kinds of magic to determine the user agent and target a version of the site as appropriate to the client (which isn't hard to achieve with those clever web standards and a decent HTML guru), I'm not particularly impressed by it.

I still reckon that AA have the best mobile site for an iPhone by a significant margin - it's at m.aa.com.

 

[samh004]

Let me think about that. I own an ipod/iphone/macbook/macbook pro 15", a 20" imac (I had an apple tv)

At work I have on my desk a 27" Imac - and an 8 core macpro at my feet ... (and a small HP dc7700 desktop for outlook - as I dont like using entourage )

And you do what dream job for a living?

 

[tuppaware]

I still reckon that AA have the best mobile site for an iPhone by a significant margin - it's at m.aa.com.

Agreed - But how often would you want to try book a flight via an iphone?
The most complex thing I have done is booked a movie.

And you do what dream job for a living?

I working as a technical specialist for a 'Creative Industries' Faculty within a university. Trust me once you work with macs in a enterprise space with 'creative' academics you soon learn to hate apple.

 

[drewbles]

I'm a fan but alas, relating back to the title of this thread, that won't run on the iPhone (or iPad) either...

Or anything but IE?