Adobe Flash to be Phased Out by Adobe Edge?

Adobe Flash has been a staple product for web developers and animation artists for years. The usability and efficiency is unparalleled according to many. The beta for the new program, Adobe Edge, is taking similar, popular components and transferring them to an HTML5 setting. Adobe is striving to bring the comfort level users enjoy with Flash to the HTML5 environment.

Edge combines some of the most familiar animation features of Flash with some of the benefits of HTML5 in one familiar yet innovative program that leads us from the desktop use of Flash to the smartphone platform capabilities of Edge. Pages produced with Edge use the familiar JSON to encode the animation and the Webkit rendering engine from Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari to display the animations. Edge uses behind the scenes HTML5 to incorporate scripting and styling from Adobe’s own scripts, jQuery and CSS .

This beta version of Edge is rudimentary and will be expanded for its public preview. It will offer expanded features such as interactivity, richer graphics, and more flexible drawing with the Edge itself. The company plans to release version one of the product sometime in 2012.

Even when Edge is complete, it will probably not replace Flash in the short term. Adobe’s position is that the two have different strengths and can co-exist, at least for now. Flash is stronger at producing games and handling streaming media on the desktop, whereas Edge is better at interactive web pages and advertising. While Flash has been a main stay of the desktop, it is fairly rare on the smartphones. Delivering ads through the web and on the smartphone platforms requires the use of HTML5, which is the niche for Edge.

The ad focus may diminish Edge’s usefulness on the still widespread older desktop browsers, but with the smartphone applications being its strong suit further desktop support may not be necessary. Adobe is hoping to combine the strengths of the past in Flash with the innovations of the future of HTML5 with Edge to maintain a strong web presence far into the future.