New iPhone Browser Maker, Opera, Chooses Apple Over Adobe? [Opera Says It Has to Support Flash But Seems to Share Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash]

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As you already know Opera Mini has become one of the most successful downloaded iPhone apps as soon as it became available in the App Store. Today this new iPhone mobile browser developer has apparently taken a stance in the whole Apple vs Adobe matter and it looks like Opera is somewhat critical of Flash but it will still offer support for it.

We’d have nowhere to know whether Opera would change their argument had Apple not approved its application a while ago, would we?

We’re not saying that Opera is biased in any way to take a pro-Apple approach of the matter since the truth on those Thoughts on Flash is somewhere in between. Neither Apple nor Adobe are completely right or wrong and, like I said before, I’m sure a compromised could be achieved if both parties really wanted to.

Getting back to Opera, it looks like its product analyst Phillip Grønvold seems to think that HTML5 is going to be a major part of the Internet, but the company still has to support Flash in order to deliver a true Internet experience. Well that’s definitely not a 100% pro-Apple argument as he’s basically saying that without Flash there is no “today’s Internet.”

Here are some of his quotes which support Steve Jobs’ claims:

“But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology”

“But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that.”

On the other hand, Flash is going nowhere yet and he seems to agree with Adobe on various points:

“Today’s internet content is dependant on Flash,” said Grønvold. “If you remove Flash you do not have today’s internet”

“We are trying to give the best internet experience for our users therefore we need Flash – there is no way to beat around that bush.”

“Flash does have its purposes and will have its purposes, the same as [Microsoft's] Silverlight and others, especially for dynamic content.”

“Because eventually we will have the canvas [of the web] in good quality and we’ll have the toolsets to use that canvas in the quality but in the foreseeable future, 18 months or so, Flash is not going away and it is critical.”

As you can see Adobe will have a hard time in the near future as it will be praised by some and fiercely criticized by others. What’s certain though is that Flash isn’t going anywhere yet, at least not from Opera’s current and future browser versions.