Google gives Flash some hope for the future

Companies like Microsoft and Apple have been giving Adobe a bit of a hard time -- not supporting Flash on their mobile devices, and blaming the plugin for being sub-par. With big players shunning Adobe, and technologies like Silverlight and HTML5 threatening to steal developers, something has got t happen.

Today, Google announced that it has actively been working with the company to integrate Flash player directly into Chrome -- no more manual updates for Flash, and better security to boot. The dev release of the browser already supports the new integrated player if you use the command line argument "--enable-internal-flash" when launching the app.

This is actually big news for Adobe -- With devices like iPhone, Windows Mobile 7, iPad, etc. refusing to support Flash, the future of the company was looking bleak. Google Chrome is a browser that is on the verge of becoming huge -- people who use it, for the most part, love it.

In addition, Google Chrome OS is in the works -- if that is anything as successful as Google wants it to be, an integrated Flash plugin is welcome news -- no plugins to install manually, everything is done behind the scenes.

It will be interesting if Google does the same thing with technologies like Microsoft Silverlight. If they can swing a deal like that, users visiting websites with this content can feel more secure as these plugins will be running inside the Google Chrome "sandbox". What do you think of the announcement?