Adobe 'at war' with Apple over developers

Adobe's chief executive has told delegates at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco that Adobe and Apple are at war over developers.

The first question put to Shantanu Narayen during a Q&A session was about Apple, and he was unequivocal about the current state of play between the two companies.

"There is a war happening for developers. We are all about a multi-platform, heterogeneous, open ecosystem. And that's what we're going to be focused on," he said, according to Reuters.

"And Apple will continue to like to keep that closed and proprietary. So let the games begin."

Narayen also repeated denials that Flash is a drain on battery life, but with the qualification that Flash does not have a major impact on computers with hardware acceleration.

Narayen also commented on rumours that Microsoft is considering acquiring Adobe, saying that he had met with Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, but that the meetings were just part of a regular conversation about Adobe being a "good independent software vendor".

Flash and HTML5 could co-exist perfectly happily, he said, announcing that Google is to begin ranking Flash applications in search results.