Steve “lets arrest a hack” Jobs has issued a huge rant attacking Adobe. In an Open Letter he lists six things that he thinks makes Flash is wrong for mobile devices and why it smells of wee.

Firstly he said that Flash is not open and while Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. "By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system," claims Jobs. Of course the irony of that statement coming from a control freak who orders the police to bash down reporter's doors in a desperate bid to keep his iPhone 4G a secret has totally past him by.  The fact that Apple is famous for being more closed than Penn State Prison is apparently not the point.

Steve fights back against Adobe's claim of Apple devices missing out on "the full web," with an age-old argument claiming that the likes of YouTube aided by the numerous new sources that have started providing video to the iPhone and iPad in HTML5 or app form like CBS, Netflix, and Facebook. However the fact that Adobe is right and Flash is fairly ubititous indicates that Jobs has not got a point on this one.

Steve trots out the usual "Flash is the number one reason Macs crash," but adds another great point on top of this: "We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it."   Fair enough, but what are you offering?  A standard that does not work yet? He added that Flash chews up battery as the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. But those "older generation" sites that haven't moved to H.264 yet are pretty much the exact same sites that aren't viewable with HTML5, which means we're being restricted in the content we can access just because some of it doesn't perform as well.

Jobs said that Flash cannot use touch properly.  It is not because they can't just that most Flash UIs are built around the idea of mouse input, and would need to be "rewritten" to work well on touch devices. "If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?" That is pretty dumb.  If you are going to update your flash site to use touch instead of a mouse, why rewrite the entire code when you only have to pen a modern adaption?

Steve finally talks about the third party development tools situation.  Which is a damn fine point.  Basically if developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features.  But it is hardly a good reason to abandon Flash and treat Adobe like a leper, which Jobs is doing.  He concludes that Flash was “created during the PC era – for PCs and mice." 

Um, what about all your Macs then? Are you abandoning them Steve?

Also read (Adobe CEOs reaction)

Adobe CEO fires back at Jobs