Skyfire will bring Flash to Apple users

By Molly McHugh November 2, 2010

The wait is finally over, and come Thursday morning, CNN Money is reporting that iOS devices will be able to run Flash. Up until now, there’s been nothing but bad news on the Flash for iPhone and iPad front. Two years ago, Adobe’s CEO determined it outright impossible without compromise on Apple’s part. And just this spring, Adobe completely scrapped all development, citing Apple’s unwillingness to relinquish any control over its platform. Apple CEO Steve Jobs open letter criticizing Flash technology and describing it as “for PCs and mice” was nearly the final blow in closing this chapter.

But Skyfire 2.0 is stepping in and will be able to display Flash content for the price of $2.99 in the App Store. The web browser has already proven effective – it’s been working with Android 2.2 devices for months. And now that Apple has eased its previously stringent application restrictions and approved Skyfire, its’ ability to convert Flash to HTML 5 made it an obvious choice to solving this dilemma.

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If you’ve had any experience with Skyfire 1.0 and are worried about the bugs it had, CEO Jeffrey Glueck wants to ease your fears. Glueck claims that all the preliminary kinks of the first version of Skyfire have been worked out, and Skyfire 2.0’s strong debut backs up his promise. Critics report Skyfire 2.0 runs faster, smoother, and as Glueck puts it “goes beyond the norms” when it comes to securing personal information.

Before iPhone and iPad users get too excited though, you should note that Flash-based games and non-video objects will remain unavailable. And of course, Hulu has banned Skyfire, so that’s still out too. Still, the trade off is more than worth it, and a lot more of the web just became available to Apple users.

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