More than a year after Steve Jobs took Adobe to task about the lack lus­ter per­for­mance and expe­ri­ence Flash pro­vides, Adobe has yet to mod­ern­ize Flash. 

Now, Microsoft has announced the Win­dows 8 ver­sion of Inter­net Explorer will be plugin-free, pre­fer­ring standards-based HTML5 con­tent to con­tent served via pro­pri­etary Adobe Flash technology. 

For the web to move for­ward and for con­sumers to get the most out of touch-first brows­ing, the Metro style browser in Win­dows 8 is as HTML5-only as pos­si­ble, and plug-in free. The expe­ri­ence that plug-ins pro­vide today is not a good match with Metro style brows­ing and the mod­ern HTML5 web.

Cou­pled with Adobe announc­ing last week the newest release of Flash Media Server will serve HTML5 ver­sions of Flash video for those run­ning iOS devices, and you have to won­der if even Adobe thinks Flash has a future.

Will Flash be left to wither on the vine much the same way Shock­wave was back in the ’90’s? Could Abode be cook­ing up a mod­ern plu­gin to sup­plant Flash and secure its hold over dig­i­tal media for the next decade?

Jeff designs print and web expe­ri­ences for a vari­ety of clients and enjoys shar­ing what he learns. He became a designer as the frac­ture between web and graphic design occurred and is now fas­ci­nated as the two dis­ci­plines are on the cusp of com­ing full-circle to merge into a new, media savvy gen­er­a­tion of design­ers. When not crazy busy, Jeff likes geo­caching and con­sum­ing copi­ous amounts of cof­fee. You should fol­low him on Twit­ter and Face­book. But not real life—that’s just creepy.