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