Is Steve Jobs keeping Flash out of Apple?
Adobe is not taking Steve Jobs’ complaints about about their Flash product lying down, and has issued a number of statements trying to clarify their position in the latest Adobe-Apple war of words.
The chief technology officer at Adobe, Kevin Lynch, defended his company this week against claims by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that his Flash product was not being used on Apple platform because it was too buggy and prone to crashes. What Jobs reportedly said about Apple and Flash at an internal Apple town hall meeting was as follows: “They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy… Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash…The world is moving to HTML5.”
These were obviously not words designed to please the people at Adobe, and they certainly did not. Adobe’s CTO responded to Jobs’ semi-public remarks, according to a PCMag article. Some quotes from his replies follow:
We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on [the iPhone and iPad] if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.
Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web.
I don’t see this as one replacing the other, certainly not today nor even in the foreseeable future. The productivity and expressiveness of Flash remain advantages for the Web community even as HTML advances.
Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today. Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10.
Lynch also pointed out that Flash is running on 98 percent of computers that access the Web, and on 85 percent of Websites worldwide. It is not really known whether or not Steve Jobs’ personal preferences alone are what is keeping Flash off Apple products. In fact, little is really known outside of the current war of words, given the penchant of Apple and Jobs for secrecy. However, all indications are that Jobs is firmly in control of his company, and if he has decided he does not like Adobe or Flash, that would be enough to form company policy.
What about you? Do you think Apple should allow Flash onto its products?
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February 7th, 2010
I wonder if Apple are making a Flash clone, that would come packaged in their next update and already be installed in mobile safari. They could just write their own plugin that can access flash based web content. Kinda how neo office can utilize microsoft office files.
February 8th, 2010
I think apple should allow flash, not to annoy anybody here, but because most every app is flash or shockwave. Even youtube runs on flash!
February 8th, 2010
YouTube and Vimeo are beta testing non-Flash video display. It’s just a matter of time until Flash is history in this market segment — death to Flash!
http://fairerplatform.com/2010/01/help-youtube-test-html5-video-death-to-flash/
http://fairerplatform.com/2010/01/vimeo-rolling-html5-web-video-too/
April 30th, 2010
video is one very small part of what flash is currently leading in, have u played any good html5 games lately? no, didn’t think so. and you won’t for about 10 years. so keep crying mac fags.
May 11th, 2010
I have programmed Flash; created games, presentations etc. with it. I used it when it was hardly programmable, prior to its having a Javascript-like language. I liked the format, back in the early ’90s. But both FLash and Shockwave are resource hogs, and there’s just no doubt about that.
After using an iPod Touch for over a year, I haven’t missed Flash apps; there are plenty of apps available for relatively low cost on the App Store, and much of other web content is not dependent upon Flash to function. In my personal experience, Flash does indeed cause most crashes, both on my Apple machine, and my PC machine. So why not develop HTML5 and have a more light weight (in terms of resource usage) and dependable format to create dynamic content?