Jobs versus Adobe - the war of words continues

The war of words between Apple and Adobe heated up late this week, with the latter's chief technology officer forced to defend his firm's popular Flash technology from Steve Jobs' earlier jibes.

According to reports circulating at the beginning of the week, Jobs used the occasion of a big Apple meeting to have a rant at Google and Adobe, saying his firm 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," he's reported by Wired as saying.

In a later blog posting, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch sought to play up the near-ubiquity of Flash on the web, its long history and support for all but one (guess which) of the top smartphone manufacturers' devices. He went on to explain why Apple, and therefore the new iPad, does not support Flash.

"We have shown that Flash technology is starting to work on these devices today by enabling standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash," he wrote.

"In fact, some of these apps are already available in the Apple App Store such as FickleBlox and Chroma Circuit. This same solution will work on the iPad as well. We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices 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."

He went on to defend the technology's security and reliability credentials.

"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," he said.

"We work directly with the major browser teams - including Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft IE, and Google Chrome - and review any emerging issues so we can resolve them together."

Lynch does however admit in his blog that Flash Player on Windows has historically always been faster than the Mac, and adds that Chrome browser users are currently suffering Flash errors.

He goes on to recognise that "there may either be an upswing in incidents or there is a general piling on happening".

Whether Jobs will now come back to hurl more insults at the Flash-maker (or anyone else for that matter) remains to be seen. We kind of hope he does though - at least it makes tech a bit exciting.

05 Feb 2010