I am a victim of Apple's war with Adobe over Flash. (Apple won. I heard Adobe is dropping Flash.) I really like to chat from my mobile devices, especially my iPad or iPhone when I'm away from the house. Any chance of a change there?
I believe that when EC is upgraded to the next version of whatever forum software it is using (or whatever sie overhaul is being planned that I hear whispers of), chat will become a part of the main site rather than a separate application tacked on. I don't know when the shift is planned for, but the staff are working hard on it. At that point, chat will change and may not be flash; I don't know.
We're definitely hoping to replace the chat function which is a bit long in the tooth at this point. What we'll replace it with has yet to be determined, but yes, the fact that Flash is a dying technology, particularly on mobile platforms, means that we'll certainly be looking for something that doesn't use Flash. Hopefully this will all come about fairly soon (next couple months) but it really just depends on staff time.
To throw in my two cents it'd be really great imo to be able to use the chat with an IRC client like mIRC, since it looks like the chat system is already based on IRC. I'd find it to be a lot easier and more convenient.
IRC is an open platform which would make it harder to maintain privacy and restrict access to the server/room.
The current chat is a proprietary platform. We're almost for sure going away from it, but it would be very, very unlikely for us to adopt an IRC-based chat for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which would be our unique security requirements, and the ability to have something easy to support across multiple platforms without need for external chat clients and such. It seems pretty likely we'll end up with something that is web-based and (hopefully) doesn't require flash.
