You’ve probably heard about Apple’s Steve Jobs’ war against Adobe’s Flash. Jobs thinks or at least proclaims that Flash is an insecure and outdated technology and that it will not find its way on Apple’s mobile devices. Others say that the whole internet relies on Flash these days and that the web would be mostly without Flash.

Well, it’s not! After having surfed the internet with my iPad for several weeks I can honestly say: I don’t need Flash anymore, and soon no-one will need Flash anymore. Most websites that I personally use don’t make use of Flash at all. Google, Facebook and even YouTube, they all work without Flash. The only Flash elements I noticed not working where banner ads. I can live without them.

Facebook has created a slick web interface using JavaScript. And YouTube uses HTML5 to display videos on modern browsers without Flash. I can watch YouTube videos on my Apple devices without any problems.

I’ve played around with HTML5 a little bit lately. It makes a lot of things a lot simpler, including the integration of audio and video content. Finally there is also an “audio” and a “video” tag. No need to implement 10 lines of code to display a video using Flash anymore. HTML5 can store data locally and even run offline.

If you are a Flash developer, let me tell you: It’s time to learn something new unless you want to be a dinosaur in a couple of years. In five years Flash will have become mostly irrelevant as most services will have switched to HTML5.