Yup, that’s right folks. The iPad, just as the iPhone and the iPod before it, will not support Flash. It doesn’t come as a surprise, seeing the long history of Apple’s refusal to support the popular web multimedia platform.

Adobe Flash was first introduced in 1996 (under Macromedia) and has now become the most popular way to include high quality animation and interactivity on the web. Entire games have been created from Flash, from simple addictive Tower Defense games, your favourite games in Facebook (Farmville, Pet Society) to a full blown Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG).

Popular video streaming sites like YouTube, Google Video and Hulu uses Flash to play their videos – making the platform one of the most used and most important multimedia tool on the Internet today.

So, just why exactly won’t Apple support this wildly in-demand feature?

iPod and iPhone users have been screaming for Flash support for years, but their pleas have so far been fruitless. Apple continues to throw out newer models of the iPod and iPhone without any signs of Flash support.

The same goes for the latest device from Apple, the iPad.

Strangely enough, instead of implementing Flash into their iPhone OS, Apple have instead developed a standalone app for the OS to allow users to connect directly to YouTube. Good news for many, but bad news for those who frequent other video sites like Hulu.com. No doubt, this will be same with the iPad as well.

According to a report in Wired magazine, an unnamed source had cited that Steve Jobs recently spoke to a number of Apple employees on a few subjects, one of them being Adobe Flash.

Steve Jobs was claimed to have called Adobe as “lazy” and claiming that the reason why Apple has refused to support (and will continue to do so) Adobe Flash because it is full of bugs.

Steve says that most of the time when a Mac actually crashes, it’s Adobe’s fault with their buggy Flash platform.

He also made an extremely bold claim that the world is moving towards HTML5, and that Flash will be useless.

HTML5 is currently being developed as the next major revision of HTML. HTML is currently the core language used by all websites on the Internet and aims to reduce the need to depend on external technologies such as Adobe Flash and Sun Java. It is estimated to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage by 2012 and W3C Recommendation by 2022. However, some parts of HTML5 have already been completed and are ready to be used.

Still, it doesn’t take the fact that it will still take years before HTML5 will be accepted as the standard and even then, there are not indications that Adobe Flash will just fade away.

So will Apple ever give us the Flash support?

Maybe.

But as long as the man himself continues to throw out comments like that, it’s very unlikely.