16 month old Flash bug plagues Mac, Linux, PC
Apple’s exclusion of Flash from its iPhone and, now iPad has led to firestorm of debate over the stability and security of Adobe’s multimedia authoring and display software. Many Mac users have come out against Flash, saying that the Cupertino, California-based company has been right all along to exclude it.
Matthew Dempsky discovered and has published a flaw in Adobe Flash. His original discovery occurred way, way back in September 2008 and it’s a problem that consistently to this day crashes browsers on the Mac, Linux and PC.
Dempsky has been talking to the multimedia software giant about the issue since 2008 with nothing but denials and obfuscation from Adobe to show his effort. Thereupon, the existence of this problem flies in the face of Adobe’s claim that Flash — nope, ain’t nothing there — doesn’t have any long-term, intractable crashing issues.
Gee, they lied — imagine that.
Whatever
That said, ClickToFlash for Safari and FlashBlock for Firefox and Chrome can obviate 99 percent of the problem that is Flash (i.e. the vast majority of Flash out there is advertising and utterly superfluous). Of course, once you shut down Flash, browsing speed increases radically.
Moreover, with YouTube and Vimeo moving away from Flash to HTML5 and H.264, there’s increasingly less need to use Adobe’s bastard multimedia plugin. Further thereto, there’s the SublimeVideo HTML5 + H.264 player for WebKit-based browsers, which is due to ship in final form any day now.
Lastly, Hulu has hinted that it’s not irreparably wedded to Flash either.
Intractable stability and security issues with Flash? Use it as little as possible and be alert to the availability of open-source alternatives (HTML5). It’s just a matter of time until Flash is little more than a bad memory…
What’s your take?
via TUAW
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February 8th, 2010
Hi, that link went around towards the end of last week, so you may have missed this Saturday info:
http://blogs.adobe.com/emmy/archives/2010/02/flash_bug_repor.html
(You might also want to check what YouTube and Vimeo have actually said….
jd/adobe
February 8th, 2010
“16 month old Flash bug plagues Mac, Linux, PC”
Let me fix that for you:
“16 month old Flash bug plagues Mac, Linux, Windows”
They are all
P…ersonal
C…omputers
February 9th, 2010
I find your conclusion questionable: “Use it as little as possible and be alert to the availability of open-source alternatives (HTML5)”
HTML5 is nothing without the codec encoding the videos, which (as you state) seems to emerge as H.264. This codec, however, is patented. A true open-source solution would be html5 with ogg/theora. But since there’s no set standard, a de-facto standard will be set by youtube, which seems to tend toward H.264. Pity, since this would have been a chance to enormously improve on internet video for open-source platforms.
February 9th, 2010
The sooner flash gets replaced with an open source alternative, the better. Flash and NVIDIA graphics drivers are the main components spoiling the open source experience. They must both know that their days are numbered, but they keep holding out, despite knowing how quickly the open source community will fix all their bugs, and free as well!
February 9th, 2010
glamajamma: I don’t think most Mac users realize that the only difference between a “PC” and a “Mac” is some Apple lock-out code in the system firmware and the OS itself that make sure you’re running Mac OS on a PC that Apple sold you.
Anyway, I got a kick out of it too. I don’t have a PC to run Linux, I must remember to name this thing.
February 9th, 2010
> They are all P.C.s
Thankyouthankyouthankyou. That drives me mad, as if a Mac was somehow out of that realm or as if MS was the only game in town.