It’s been a long time coming, but Adobe’s finally given Flash on mobile the axe. Much like many things designed for desktop computing, Flash was never really architectured to perform well with slower, power conscious hardware.

Call it another byproduct of the mobilization of computing, but one of the interesting trends to come out of it has been designing things with these long forgotten constraints in mind. It’s a harkening back to the old days where we had a lot less hardware to work with. When CPUs weren’t pushing 4 Ghz clock rates with astronomically long execution pipelines, and didn’t need 400 watt power supplies.

But it’s more than that. To me it’s almost like the green movement applied to computing. Do more, with less. Use every part, rather than take for granted how much we already have. Flash was never built with that philosophy in mind, and with such a large code base I’m sure such a task was unattainable without starting from scratch with a different philosophy from the beginning. As we fast forward several years after Adobe tried to fit that square peg into a round hole it never was intended to, they’re finally pulling the plug seeing that it won’t fit.

This excites me as a citizen of the web a lot. This sort of decision, while not over night, is going to make the web a better place. It won’t stop at mobile because no one wants to have two separate codebases between their increasingly more important mobile site and their maintenance mode desktop site if they don’t have to. It’s taken a lot of things to get us to this point though. HTML5, amazing new additions to CSS3, and fast JavaScript engines like V8 and SquirrelFish have long been missing pieces to complete the puzzle.

Hopefully Adobe keeps putting out great tools to help us build flash-like sites with these new advancements and get us to a plugin-less future even faster.