Adobe Responds to Steve Jobs' 'Lazy' Comments
Flash won't be replaced by HTML5 anytime soon, according to this CTO.
Earlier this month Steve Jobs made headlines when he declared that Google's "Don’t Be Evil!" motto was a load of crap and Adobe was just plain lazy. Now, Adobe doesn’t take kindly to that kind of talk and on Tuesday, CTO Kevin Lynch took to the Adobe blog to discuss the future of Flash.
Beginning with the snide snipe, "Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device," Lynch published a blog post defending Flash, which Steve Jobs said was pretty much dead anyway. According to Jobs, Flash will soon be obsolete because, "the world is moving toward HTML5."
Lynch points out that over 85 percent of the top web sites contain Flash content and Flash runs on over 98 percent of computers on the Web. "It is used for the majority of casual games, video, and animation on the Web and familiar brands like Nike, Hulu, BBC, Major League Baseball, and more rely on Flash to deliver the most compelling experiences to over a billion people," he writes.
Lynch also disagrees with the notion that soon HTML5 will replace Flash. "Some point to HTML as eventually supplanting the need for Flash," he writes, adding that he doesn't see it happening in the foreseeable future. Mr. Lynch claims that users and content creators could be 'thrown back to the dark ages of video on the web' if faced with the compatibility issues of HTML5.
"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% 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."
And, in contrast to Steve's statement about Adobe being 'lazy' and not doing enough with its potential, Lynch says:
"We have shown that Flash technology is starting to work on these [Apple] devices today by enabling standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash … This same solution will work on the iPad as well."
According to Lynch Adobe is ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices "if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users," but to date Adobe has not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.
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No 64bit flash still? Now thats Lazy...
What's lazy is how much CPU Flash uses on any computer. It's freakin stupid. It's this very drain and serious heat increase that could be damaging everyone's hardware, that will see an end to Flash's rein. Steve says that they're lazy because they never optimise their software. Take years to catch on to hardware optimisations. Flash needs to limit its CPU usage and when they do move some of it onto GPUs... make sure it doesn't completely rape those too.
The reason Flash uses a lot of CPU power is normally because it is doing a lot, displaying static images or text is not exactly taxing, so naturally Flash will consume more power to display. Having said that they are constantly working to improve the situation (it could be better I'm sure, but it has been improving in every release so far)...
Adobe are running the open screen project to make sure Flash runs better on mobile devices.
Videos of Flash running on the Droid, Nexus One, Palm Pre etc. here
With 10.1 they are offloading to the GPU, accelerating functionality on low power devices and working with tons of other manufacturers to make it better... except Apple who refuse to work with them and call them lazy.
Either way Steve Jobs calling them lazy is a ridiculous excuse, he's using it to draw controversy from his crippled new 'magical' hardware, that provides 'the ultimate browsing experience' whilst simultaneously blocking out the media rich internet!
Anyone see those nice page turn animations on his e-Reader application, guess where you saw that first.... oh yeah it was Flash.
Flash its SHITE!!!!! and its getting worse with each update. I had to reinstall my OS due to flash problems and it still crashes in Google chrome everyday at my work pc. Even their own uninstall tool doesn't do fuck all. ADOBE YOUR PRODUCTS ARE BLOATED - sort it out.
How about Adobe finally port the bloody thing to 64bit Linux properly?
Flash its SHITE!!!!! and its getting worse with each update. I had to reinstall my OS due to flash problems and it still crashes in Google chrome everyday at my work pc. Even their own uninstall tool doesn't do fuck all. ADOBE YOUR PRODUCTS ARE BLOATED - sort it out.
You had to reinstall you O/S because of FLASH?!?!?! I wouldn't be pointing my finger at Adobe if I managed to make that much of a mess of my O/S from it...
^^^ Yes because Flash places .dll files into the windows system32 folder, uninstalling flash or using their cleaner tool doesnt get rid of these. I know it was flash because it was always crashing Firefox or Chrome but IE was ok (due to the way it handles flash differently i assume) I hate IE though, and reinstalling Windows 7 sorted it out.
I could have probably spent an afternoon trawling through System32 to find the corrupted .dll's but I just couldnt be bothered. even now after a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro 64 bit it still crashes in Chrome! but at least it doesn't close the browser like it did before so i can still browse ok and Firefox seems fine... so far.
^^^ Yes because Flash places .dll files into the windows system32 folder, uninstalling flash or using their cleaner tool doesnt get rid of these. I know it was flash because it was always crashing Firefox or Chrome but IE was ok (due to the way it handles flash differently i assume) I hate IE though, and reinstalling Windows 7 sorted it out.
I could have probably spent an afternoon trawling through System32 to find the corrupted .dll's but I just couldnt be bothered. even now after a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro 64 bit it still crashes in Chrome! but at least it doesn't close the browser like it did before so i can still browse ok and Firefox seems fine... so far.
Sorry for double post