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19 Feb 2010
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has reportedly unleashed another outburst at Adobe's Flash software in a meeting with executives from The Wall Street Journal to discuss the iPad.
Reports on US gossip site Gawker quote insiders at the meeting as saying that Jobs referred to Flash as a "CPU hog" full of "security holes". He went on to dismiss the product's future, saying: "Apple doesn't spend a lot of energy on old technology."
Jobs confirmed recently that the newly announced iPad will not support Flash, just like the company's iPhone.
The Apple chief was also quoted earlier this month as saying at a town hall meeting at Apple's Cupertino headquarters: "Whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not it's because of Flash."
Apple was contacted to ask whether the comments were true, but said that the company "does not comment on rumour or speculation".
Adobe responded to the accusations earlier this month, and the firm's chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, has now said in a blog post that the company does all it can to avoid security and reliability issues.
"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 wrote.
An Adobe Flash poll on V3.co.uk found that nearly a quarter of respondents agreed with Jobs, saying that the software "crashes my computer all the time", while nine per cent had disabled the software.
However, 36 per cent disagreed, viewing the comments as nothing more than sour grapes. A further 30 per cent have never had a problem with Flash.
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Do you agree?
Flash is flawed
I entirely agree with Jobs on this one. While no great fan of the Apple chief, on this issue he is correct. Adobe's Flash continually upsets the web experience. More often than not Google Chrome crashes because of Flash and Shockwave plug-in failures. It seems crazy so many site designers still insist on using this platform to post video content given the problems experienced by so many users
Posted by: tvnewswatch 22 Feb 2010
No Flash
Its not about whether apple or jobs supports flash or not, at the end of the day its a big part of the internet now in 1 form or another. Without it web browsing isnt too good when a site is mainly flash. Perhaps it may be better to include the support for it, but allow the user to turn it off... this would be much better option for APPLES CUSTOMERS and users of the ipod/ iphone and now ipad than not having it at all !!
Posted by: Carl 19 Feb 2010
Flash R.I.P.
Has anyone used software to monitor CPU usage on youtube's regular site and beta html5 site? Extraordinary. They look identical and the final result is identical. The difference is that flash is a CPU pig, consuming several times the resources of html5. The quicker flash is dead, the faster we can all forget about it. It seems to me that the death of flash is certain.
Posted by: James 19 Feb 2010