The Flash elephant in the room

Marco Arment recently tweeted

If you’re a web designer, you really, really need to get a Retina MacBook Pro so you can see how bad your site looks on it and fix it.

…and then blogged about the (mostly negative) reactions he got.

I totally to agree with Marco and Daniel Jalkut that you have to Target The Forward Fringe. However, there’s a much more important thing that web developers need to be doing first, for the very same reasons: remove all use of Adobe Flash from their sites, or at the very least have a decent looking version of the site for browsers without Flash. A site may look bad without HiDPI support, but it’s still usable. It still works. If a site requires Adobe Flash, it doesn’t just look bad on non-Flash browsers, it’s simply unusable. It might as well not exist. And we’re not just talking about The Forward Fringe here, a significant and rapidly increasing percentage of people are using iOS devices as their primary device for accessing the web. Android won’t support Flash from version 4.1 onwards. As far as we know Microsoft Surface won’t support Flash either. It won’t be long before the majority of web clients don’t support Flash. Removing Flash from web sites is far, far more important than adding HiDPI support.