Apple and Adobe still at war over Flash
Veritable barrages of words have flown both ways in the battle of opinions between Adobe and Apple regarding Flash, whether or not iPhone users need it and whether or not Apple will allow it.
Apple’s Steve Jobs has reportedly said that the folks at Adobe were lazy, that they shipped buggy products, and that Flash was a technology of the past, soon to be replaced by HTML 5. Adobe has, of course, taken exception to those remarks, according to a MacWorld story. Mark Doherty, styled as the “Flash evangelist†from Adobe has had a lot to say about this issue in his blog, as the following excerpts show:
A little while ago I blogged about our new iPhone page at the Flash Player download center, the same site where hundreds of millions of users download and upgrade Flash every year.
We were amazed by the numbers of hits received from iPhone OS devices, from users seeking the Flash Player to play back rich content from their favourite sites. Users that, before we created the special page, had no idea that Apple do not want them viewing the Internet as they see it today.
It has now been reported that over 7 million attempts were made by users to download the player by December 2009, that’s up from 3 million attempts in June 2009.
There is more in this salvo back from Adobe, including word from Adobe’s chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, who had the following to say:
Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device. (speaking of the iPad)
Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass.
Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75 per cent of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.
At the same time, there is news that Adobe did indeed ship a very buggy version of Flash for the Mac, one which caused crashes of Firefox when accessing Flash content. This was apparently ignored for more than a year by Adobe after it was reported, so Steve may have had some facts on his side during his tirade. Regardless of the facts, it looks like this particular war of words might last for a while.
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