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Steve Jobs Publishes Some "Thoughts On Flash" 944

teh31337one writes "Steve Jobs just posted an open letter of sorts explaining Apple's position on Flash, going back to his company's long history with Adobe and expounding upon six main points of why he thinks Flash is wrong for mobile devices. HTML5 naturally comes up, along with a few reasons you might not expect. He concludes in saying that 'Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice.'" Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.
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Steve Jobs Publishes Some "Thoughts On Flash"

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  • by sopssa ( 1498795 ) * <sopssa@email.com> on Thursday April 29, 2010 @10:54AM (#32030576) Journal

    Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.

    Exactly, and the software/iPhone is not only proprietary, but actually restricted too. It's even worse than just proprietary software.

    - Open source: Nobody restricts where you can install the application, and you get the source code too -- the best situation.
    - Proprierary software: You dont get the source code, but nobody is restricting where or if you can install it, as long as its freeware or you have paid for it.
    - Apple: Not only will you not get the source code and in most cases you have to pay for it, Apple is in total control what applications the user is allowed to install. They dont even give you the option to decide yourself.

    If you want to sell your software in App Store, you are not allowed to redistribute the source code or your app outside of it.

    While certainly true, making a comment about Flash being proprietary is just hypocrisy and at the same time hilarious from Steve Jobs and Apple.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      How is this hypocritical? Jobs makes no assertion one way or another about how Adobe should handle licensing flash to developers. He's just saying "If you want to see something in my store, it may not be flash." You may think it's a bad idea, but bad-in-your-opinion and hypocritical are two different concepts.

    • by sqlrob ( 173498 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:30AM (#32031268)

      - Proprierary software: You dont get the source code, but nobody is restricting where or if you can install it, as long as its freeware or you have paid for it.

      Ubisoft would like a word with you

    • by bondsbw ( 888959 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:40AM (#32031444)

      It's even worse than just proprietary software.

      It depends on your definition of worse. Apple may be overly controlling, but it seems to work well for them and their target market. Don't you remember how fast the iPhone grew and how it changed the world of smartphones?

      My guess is that you don't fit perfectly in their target market. I don't see how that would make them "bad". It just means that they have chosen the best path for growing their business and company. You are still perfectly free to say "F--- you, Apple!" and go find a Droid, Pre, Blackberry, W7 Phone, etc.

    • by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:41AM (#32031462)

      I suppose you didn't read Steve Job's words because in the very next paragraph he writes:

      Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open.

      Steve is making this distinction: apps can be proprietary, web standards should not be. Text is open while Word, NotePad, TextPad, AppleWorks, etc. are not open. That's his point.

      Apple: Not only will you not get the source code and in most cases you have to pay for it, Apple is in total control what applications the user is allowed to install. They dont even give you the option to decide yourself.

      This is true of iPhone SDK. This is not true of Apple in general. Darwin, CUPS, and WebKit are all open source. Apple also distributes for free the other open source code it uses like their version of bash, BIND, etc.

      • by beakerMeep ( 716990 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:59AM (#32031778)
        When many apps are moving to cloud based syncing, desktop and mobile apps seem like an arbitrary line in the sand for forgiving yourself for being proprietary. Not only that but the SWF spec is open, and there are open source Flash development tools too. Adobe has other significant open source work too with Flex, Tamarin, BlaseDS, etc etc. Heck they originally wrote the JIT for firefox.

        So yeah, his distinction rings hollow and untrue.
        • by s73v3r ( 963317 ) <s73v3r.gmail@com> on Thursday April 29, 2010 @01:21PM (#32033234)
          The SWF spec is about as open as the OfficeXML spec from Microsoft. Yeah, its there, but its not the "real" spec. The published one has lots of inconsistencies, and the official implementation from Adobe deviates from the spec quite a bit.
      • by virgilp ( 1774784 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:53PM (#32032716)

        Well, but SWF format is open, did you know that? You're free to do your own player today. In fact some people are trying now to run SWF files in HTML5 (effectively a player made using HTML5 technologies - see http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/ [paulirish.com] )
        So your analogy is backfiring... if "text is open whyle AppleWorks is not", Adobe can say the very same thing: "SWF is open format, Flex SDK is open source, only Flash Player and Flash Pro are not".
        As for Webkit being open-source.... it's the engine of Safari, right? Safari is not. open-source, right?
        Now let's see... the engine of Flash Player is Tamarin. Flash Player is not open-source, but Tamarin itself *IS*.

        What a surprise.... guess Adobe is just as open (scratch that, sorry, it's much more open... they don't restrict what you can and cannot run on their platform).

    • by catbutt ( 469582 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:47AM (#32031580)
      I don't see it as hypocricy. Flash being closed is a problem not simply because it is closed, but it is closed to Apple. If it doesn't work the way Apple wants it to, they can't do anything about it. If Apple's own closed stuff doesn't work as they wish, they can do something about it because it is, obviously, not closed to Apple.

      Whether or not you agree with their business decision to not allow closed things from other companies on their devices, I don't see how you can call that hypocrisy, especially since he specifically mentions that many things from Apple are indeed closed.
    • by Eighty7 ( 1130057 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:50AM (#32031648)
      "Too bad they can't both lose"

      -Henry Kissinger on the iran-iraq war
    • by nosfucious ( 157958 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:51AM (#32031654)

      You know, I'm actually ok with that.

      Nobody's holding a gun to your head, making you buy it.

      Yes, it is proprietory. No, my PCs run linux. There are alternatives phone and PDAs out there which are free.

      Linux on my workstations does the job I want. Apple on my PDA does the job I want. There isn't a piece of data on it that isn't hosted somewhere else. There is a place for Open source, and closed source (and open and closed platforms).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      - Open source: A concept
      - Proprietary software: A collective term for actual implementations of code
      - Apple: A (hardware, mostly) company
      - App Store: An online sales channel

      You compare these with each other and get modded "insightful"? *sigh* - there were times on /. when "category mistake" wasn't a foreign term to the majority of readers (or mods).

    • by buckhead_buddy ( 186384 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:50PM (#32032658)

      sopssa wrote: "Open Source: Nobody restricts where you can install the application, and you get the source code too -- the best situation."

      No, open source is about "source" code, not the applications or products you build with it. It doesn't guarantee you'll be able to run the compiled products on a platform, since that would also promise open source programmers will fix all the bugs that stop you from running their code on a platform. You've got the source, but that's only half the battle.

      sopssa continued: "Proprierary software: You dont get the source code, but nobody is restricting where or if you can install it, as long as its freeware or you have paid for it."

      First, proprietary software is not code. Licensing proprietary code or software often demands where you can deploy it in the license, but without that license the law says "nowhere". Heck, even some open source code such as GCC places demands on how the licensed code is deployed; you don't agree with the terms of the license and you again have no freedom to deploy it.

      sopossa concludes: "Apple: Not only will you not get the source code and in most cases you have to pay for it, Apple is in total control what applications the user is allowed to install. They dont even give you the option to decide yourself."

      Again, this conflates source and product, but I get the sense that sopssa's real complaint is about the locked down practices of saying what you can run on your Apple products. Even then you do have options; if it's a personal itch you need to scratch you can jailbreak or become a developer and deploy to a small handful of iProducts. But if you want to make "the next big thing" available to all platform users Apple does demand to play by our rules or go to a different playground.

      When viewed as a fledgling platform that's still struggling with performance and security, that's not an unreasonable demand. When viewed as a multi-billion dollar, uber-popular computing platform, it is downright offensive. I vacillate between these perspectives regularly, but fortunately Apple's products are the only computing product around.

      If Adobe becomes wildly successful on Android, Apple might change their mind about adoption. But Apple has made it clear they aren't going to be the pioneer with Flash on a mobile platform.

  • First off, the original press release is strangely hidden behind a div below the paraphrase of the press release -- why not press release and then commentary? A minor gripe but reading them in the order they presented them, I got the feeling I was being told what to think about what Jobs said prior to reading what it actually was that he said. Then there's always the fear that the reader doesn't bother with the actual press release.

    Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.

    And of course, he knows this. Which is why he spends one paragraph railing against Adobe and the next paragraph justifying Apple as distinctively different products and then even another paragraph praising Apple for their WebKit work. From the original press release:

    Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

    Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android's browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft's uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

    Of course, he spends more time and words making sure that Apple's version of proprietary is justified while they have even been a leader in open web standards.

    My opinion, if you care to hear it, is that it's really easy to jump on someone for not being open when it's not your bread and butter that's at stake. I don't like Adobe and I don't like Apple but what I see here is Adobe scrambling to maintain control and authority over Flash because they perceive (possibly correctly) that to be their lifeline in a turbulent marketplace. Essentially I feel like Jobs said "Adobe's not open and we're not open in our core business but there are auxiliary/complimentary efforts we've been instrumental with that are actually open." While he completely overlooks similar "good will" efforts by Adobe to release the source code of the Flex 3 SDK [wikipedia.org] (I don't find it to be truly open source [adobe.com] like they market it though). And he's being disingenuous towards his users in order to make more money which requires reduced functionality of his device. He's a businessman. They are known to not only make decisions like this but their stockholders often require it with threat of litigation.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot AT worf DOT net> on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:19AM (#32031084)

      My opinion, if you care to hear it, is that it's really easy to jump on someone for not being open when it's not your bread and butter that's at stake. I don't like Adobe and I don't like Apple but what I see here is Adobe scrambling to maintain control and authority over Flash because they perceive (possibly correctly) that to be their lifeline in a turbulent marketplace

      Probably at the urging of the biggest users of flash - advertisers. For everyone wanting flash - I dare you to disable all addons that block flash - including NoScript, AdblockPlus, FlashBlock and others. You'll find that a good majority of pages will have some flash ad or other on it, and sites that require flash like YouTube, Vimeo, HomeStarRunner and the like are the narrow minority of sites.

      You'll probably turn flash blockers on again after a few minutes of browsing. Now imagine that on your phone, except you've got a processor that's a third as fast (since the Nexus 1 and iPad have Ghz CPUs), and which is probably spending more time rendering the flash than rendering the page.

      I've got devices that have full Flash. Let's just say having the page stop rendering so I can view the ad in real time isn't exactly the best browsing experience I've had. Or even worse, videos that still drop frames (on my Nokia N810), or one site that consumed so much CPU time, it was effectively locked up trying to play a video (1 frame every 30 seconds, 2 seconds of audio every 30 seconds, UI unresponsive). Easiest way to back out of that was remove the battery, losing other data (yay multitasking).

      Adobe's probably getting pressure from advertisers. Surprisingly, Adobe hasn't fast-tracked a Flash player for the more open platforms out there - 3 years of griping about Flash on the iPhone, and they don't have anything for Android.

      • by __aaaaxm1522 ( 121860 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:29PM (#32032342)

        Double amen to the above post!

        Anyone that gripes about wanting Flash on their phone/mobile device *HAS NEVER HAD* Flash on a mobile device. If they had, they wouldn't want it so bad.

        I've got a Nokia N800, and the Flash experience is *terrible*. Let me tell you what great fun it is to wait for a page to render because some advertiser has a tiny little flash ad in the corner of a page. On an iPhone, the page loads instantly. On my N800? Forget it. It'll sit there and churn on that on poorly written/designed Flash app until *finally*, it appears.

        And let's say that for the fun of it I actually want to interact with that silly little Flash ad. Oh look! It uses hover states for mouse tracking - something that isn't supported on a touch interface... so instead of playing its silly little game or whatever, I end up clicking through to whatever site it links to.

        Flash on a mobile? No thanks. Been there, had that, sent it back to the kitchen.

  • Whoosh! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Akido37 ( 1473009 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @10:59AM (#32030700)

    Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.

    That's kind of the whole point. Jobs admits that Apple has a closed system, when Adobe is claiming theirs is open. When he talks about open, he's referring to HTML5/CSS/JavaScript, which you DO NOT need to submit to the app store.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Exactly, hes using the HTML5 argument against one portion of the Flash discussion, while completely ignoring the other half of said discussion - Flash native apps versus Cocoa native apps. Proprietary vs proprietary.

      His point about Flash sites being built for hover overs, which isn't supported on touch capable devices, is also a bit strange since a lot of JavaScript requires hover overs as well - don't see him take issue with that, do we?
      • Re:Whoosh! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:26AM (#32031204)

        He doesn't ignore that argument at all. He makes it very clear that they are rejecting flash applications because they don't want it to become a primary way of developing applications. If it *did* become a primary way of developing applications, apple would add features to the iPhone, and no one would use them, because adobe hadn't yet got round to adding support to flash. They don't want that situation.

    • Re:Whoosh! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Darth Snowshoe ( 1434515 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:22AM (#32031138)
      NO, nearly everybody in this thread is, again, missing the point. Steve had six, 6, different points or items or arguments he brought up. EVERYONE here wants to rail about openness. I get it, we all get it already. That argument would be the same whether iPad supported flash or not. But what about security, performance, reliability? No one here has anything to say about that, and I'll take that as tacitly agreeing that Steve is right on those issues. Likewise, what about the HW vs SW argument? It's easy for code developers, some of whom I'm guessing have invested a fair about of time and training in becoming adept at flash, to just wave their arms and say "battery life is somebody else's problem". Well, yes, the hardware manufacturer's, for one. Here is a hardware manufacturer's response. Etc. Maybe you could just post an open thread each day in which people could gripe about the App store and its closed system, instead of allowing every thread about Apple to devolve into that.
      • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:28PM (#32032302) Journal

        I happen to agree with practically of his points, and have been saying much the same thing about Flash since the beginning of this whole debate.

        Honestly, I don't have much sympathy for Adobe here. No matter how loudly they whine - the fact remains that they rely too heavily on their products securing a place in the computing world simply because they're "good concepts", vs. making the effort necessary to ensure they're solid and reliable in actual use.

        EG. Adobe Acrobat Reader is in such widespread use in the Windows world, it may as well be rolled into the operating system itself. BUT, if you actually stop and look around, you find plenty of better alternatives to work with your PDF documents. Kind of pathetic, really, when you consider PDF is Adobe's own invention, yet other people are handling the format better than they are! For example, people using the free PDF reader offered by Nuance get the ability to do document markup/annotation to their PDFs, and it launches a lot faster than Acrobat Reader too. And on the Mac side, the difference is even more striking. Apple's own "Preview" app in OS X is MANY times faster than Acrobat Reader for OS X, and even allows re-ordering pages in a PDF before printing or re-saving it. But all of that aside, look at Adobe's track record just handling installs/uninstalls/updates! Take a look at any Windows PC that's been around a while. If it has the latest (or even version 8.x) of Acrobat Reader on it, obtained through Adobe's automatic updates over time - go into C:\Program Files\Adobe and see what's in there. Betcha it's not just the folder for the current version of Acrobat Reader! I've seen multiple megabytes of leftovers in there on most systems from Acrobat 7 and even 5 or 6. They're TERRIBLE about doing housekeeping when updating their product!

        And frankly, Acrobat Reader may arguably be Adobe's BEST piece of free software they let you download! Flash is multiple times worse! It crashes regularly, eats huge amounts of CPU time, and isn't consistently updated to work with the latest browser and OS technologies.

        I'm not much of a Microsoft fan either, but let's face the facts. When have you heard the kind of negativity about Microsoft's competing Silverlight technology? It's basically the MS version of Flash, but it seems to run much better for people (even if that's just because it isn't as old, and doesn't have as much "legacy code" in it?) I've heard rumors they may release it for the iPhone at some point, too. That would further illustrate that this is a real failing on ADOBE'S part, not Apple's.

      • Re:Whoosh! (Score:5, Informative)

        by HanClinto ( 621615 ) <hanclinto@gmail.cCOFFEEom minus caffeine> on Thursday April 29, 2010 @01:22PM (#32033258)

        Likewise, what about the HW vs SW argument? It's easy for code developers, some of whom I'm guessing have invested a fair about of time and training in becoming adept at flash, to just wave their arms and say "battery life is somebody else's problem". Well, yes, the hardware manufacturer's, for one. Here is a hardware manufacturer's response. Etc.

        Okay, let's talk about the HW vs SW argument. Adobe needed API support from Apple before they could add hardware video decoding to their Flash Player. This API was only added in OSX 10.6.3, and even then, won't even run on my Macbook Pro, because it's older than a year and a half old, and Apple is not (yet?) providing API support for older hardware. You can rest assured, that now that Apple has finally provided an API for developers to use, Adobe has jumped on it [kaourantin.net], but due to Apple's half-way job of it, much of Apple hardware is not supported.

        Oh right, I forgot -- I'm supposed to believe Adobe has been the sole lazy company here. Adobe recognizes they have more resources available that they're not yet utilizing -- but these were only recently made available by Apple.

        Somehow Steve forgot to mention this in his tirade, didn't he? Convenient.

  • by sethstorm ( 512897 ) * on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:05AM (#32030814) Homepage

    Turtleneck calling the kettle black?

    My choice? It's Nokia. At least they have a happy medium of openness, functionality, and usability. Yes, they have Flash.

  • by thetoadwarrior ( 1268702 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:06AM (#32030822) Homepage
    Java is open and proven in the mobile space and Apple (or anyone) could ensure the JVM used is up to date and allows the use of any new features or hardware.

    I think apple mmeans they only want you to do it their way and preferably you do it their way on a mac when developing.
    • by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:25AM (#32031194)

      Java is open and proven in the mobile space and Apple (or anyone) could ensure the JVM used is up to date and allows the use of any new features or hardware.

      It breaks the security model. Right now someone writes malware for the iPhone, Apple finds out, revokes the keys and the malware goes away except on phones it managed to jailbreak. It stops spreading and we move on. If Java apps are allowed in the JVM then, Apple has to revoke all Java apps and they all stop working the first time someone writes a Java-based malware.

      Now take the same concern and apply it to multitasking etc. and add in the fact that every time Apple adds a feature they have to update the JVM to work with it as well as their normal APIs. Apple does not want to go back to maintaining their own fork of the JVM like they used to do for the desktop.

  • by RevWaldo ( 1186281 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:12AM (#32030932)
    Adobe CS 6 - Now available for Windows 7, Linux...and that's it.

    We said that's it! What, what!!?

    .
  • by Anita Coney ( 648748 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:14AM (#32030988) Homepage

    When Jobs uses "proprietary" he means "not mine."

  • Tacky (Score:5, Insightful)

    by qoncept ( 599709 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:15AM (#32030992) Homepage
    What is really tacky is all the whining about the lack of Flash on Apple devices. The people calling for it are undoubtedly the same people who were bitching about what an awful piece of garbage Flash is right up until they found out they couldn't get it on their iPhones. At a time where there are alternatives and better options are right around the corner, no less.
  • Mercy mercy!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by burris ( 122191 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:15AM (#32030994)

    "We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers."

    Yet, it is just fine with Steve Jobs if every iDeveloper is at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when their enhancements will be made available to their customers.

  • by Ichoran ( 106539 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:20AM (#32031094)

    As someone who routinely writes in Java (or JVM-targeting languages) because it will run anywhere, it is hard to read Jobs' criticism that Adobe has been too slow with Flash support for OS X with a straight face.

    Apple's track record with Java--from having 1.6 appear years late, to dropping 32 bit support, to insisting on packaging it themselves--seems to strongly indicate that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to cross-platform compatibility.

    Notice that Apple's only making a fuss now that Adobe is stepping up its support. That'll teach anyone to try to make their cross-platform tools work better with Apple's products, won't it!

    • by ahankinson ( 1249646 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @01:03PM (#32032898)

      Apple's track record with Java--from having 1.6 appear years late, to dropping 32 bit support, to insisting on packaging it themselves--seems to strongly indicate that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to cross-platform compatibility.

      First: It was Sun that decided (up until recently) that they wouldn't open-source Java. (I still don't know if all of it is open source...) If they had, then users could compile it themselves, with the options they want.

      Second, Apple wanted to make sure that the crappy Swing interfaces in most Java apps at least looked somewhat native.

      And finally, when Apple takes away the ability to cross-compile most Linux/UNIX packages, usually with just a few modifications, then you can whine about cross-platform compatibility.

  • Strange.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:20AM (#32031102)

    And the really strange thing, when I visit http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ I'm prompted that the site wants to install and run some strange, closed plugin called 'QuickTime' from 'Apple computer' in order to properly display the content.... Hmm...

  • by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:21AM (#32031116)

    Steve Joby proclaims that Flash is only for porn?

  • by sribe ( 304414 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:25AM (#32031184)

    Gee, do you think maybe that was a big part of it? Yes, there's plenty of other reasons for him to not want Flash on iPhone and iPad. But if Flash on the Mac were a decent-quality product, I suspect Adobe might have at least had a prayer of convincing him. But when their current product is the single largest source of instability, why on earth would Jobs let a mobile version anywhere near his pet project?

    I know that some people here will jump all over his assertion, and accuse him of lying. But let me tell you, I think it's true.

    I'm a heavy web user, and around Safari 3 I started to really get fed up with how crash-prone Safari was. Always crashing when I had many windows and tabs open. Everything else on my system extremely stable. Only Safari crashing. For crying out loud, the 3rd major version, and they still couldn't make it stable? Ridiculous!

    I started actually looking at the crash reports. Dozens of crashes, probably close to 100. And every single one of them was in the Flash plug-in. Not a single exception, not a single crash not in the Flash plug-in.

    Now, how many users would read a crash report and discover that Flash is the problem? And how many would just assume that Safari is buggy and blame Apple?

    That's why I knew with 99% certainty before the iPad was announced that there would be no Flash for it. To be blunt, it would have been irresponsible to let Flash near the iPad or iPhone until Adobe proves enough commitment and competence to get it working well on OS X, where it has access to vastly more resources in a far more forgiving environment.

  • yeah well... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pojut ( 1027544 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:31AM (#32031274) Homepage

    ...sticking HTML5 and wanting to use standards like it is all fine and well, but there is an assload more Flash content than HTML5 content out there right now. Why not support both HTML5 AND flash?

    HTML5 may be the future, but Flash is still what is in use today.

    • Re:yeah well... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Akido37 ( 1473009 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:02PM (#32031850)

      Why not support both HTML5 AND flash?

      HTML5 may be the future, but Flash is still what is in use today.

      That's not the way Apple works. It adopted USB when there was exactly ONE USB printer on the market. It dropped floppies while they were still in common usage. It's been pushing FireWire when nobody else is.

      Apple decides when to deprecate technology on their own devices. If you don't like it, buy something else.

  • by gaspyy ( 514539 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:34AM (#32031336)

    This has caught my eye:
    "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."

    Well, according so some benchmarks, Flash actually performs better than HTML5 on Android [visualrinse.com].

  • The missing reason (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bobfrankly1 ( 1043848 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:43AM (#32031484)
    The missing reason:

    I'm still bitter that Adobe made Photoshop CS4 64bit for windows and not mac.

  • games? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:43AM (#32031486)

    Jobs says "There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world." To me, this rings quite hollow :

    First, the vast majority of recent truly innovative small-form-factor or two-dimensional games are primarily flash games, possibly with ports to mobile platforms like the iPhone. Yes, the best such games are often rewritten for the iPhone, but ..

    Second, the vast majority of older two-dimensional games are outdated console games that now run under emulation under linux, mac os x, and windows. I'm unsure if how well the iPhone handles these games, especially old arcade games, given the lack of keyboard. I'm also unsure how well the emulators run under Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, etc. either, maybe the iPhone has the best emulators from among the mass market phones.

    I know however that my N900 offers almost all the Linux emulators, the ones I've tried play well thanks to the keyboard, even dosbox.

    Third, there are still vastly more strong titles for recent consoles or desktops that'll never play well on an iPhone within Jobs lifetime.

    Jobs does however state the all important caveat "entertainment titles" by which he presumably means all movies sold via iTunes too. Yes, other mobile platforms are not making movies available like Apple, true but kinda irrelevant.

  • by Yvanhoe ( 564877 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:45AM (#32031536) Journal
    FTA :

    Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine

    The small open source project is KHTML, a complete open-source HTML(4 at the time but I suppose it reached 5 now) rendering engine. Instead of improving it, they forked. Which is legal and ok, but not enough to recognize Apple as a standards creator on the Web.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:52AM (#32031678)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 29, 2010 @03:17PM (#32035238)

        Get over it. Apple lavished praise on KHTML--by name--when Safari was released SEVEN years ago. They were explicit on why it was chosen over Gecko. One of those reason was it was SMALL at under 140,000 lines of code. "SMALL?" Sound familiar? It was a COMPLIMENT, not a dismissal of KHTML.

        The Apple haters need to come down out of the bell tower. It's clear many on /. didn't even get to the second paragraph of what Steve had to say.

        There's a marked difference between a web standard that anyone can implement, like HTML5, and Flash. Flash sucks on Mac OS X, Steve isn't shining anyone one. Flash routinely blows up its browsers and sucks CPU cycles like a starved vampire on Mac OS X. I've read it's not so great on Linux either. OK, given these FACTS, why do you want to perpetuate the 3rd party Flash when an comparable open standard is available? Want Flash on another OS? Gotta wait for Adobe and it might even suck.

        I've noted most folks forget that Apple has been on both sides of things. They've lost control of the tool chain such as when Metroworks Codewarrior was the standard for Mac classic development. They've done "write once run elsewhere" as NeXT with OpenStep on Windows, on Solaris and the OPENSTEP/Mach OS. They've seen how Java evolved.

  • by Zaphod-AVA ( 471116 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:46AM (#32031572)

    Adobe's security track record has been pretty terrible. Flash and Reader security vulnerabilities are the most common way for malware attacks to get access to systems today. One of the main reasons Apple insists on having control of their products is to deliver a good user experience, and they currently enjoy a very positive reputation for not getting infected by viruses. I'm honestly surprised that lack of security isn't number one on the list.

    With the market penetration of the iPhone, if it used Flash it would be a huge target for malware authors. While not having Flash can be irritating, disenfecting my phone would be far worse.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 )
      disinfecting my phone would be far worse. Douglas Adams was right again: lack of telephone sanitizers will doom the planet!
  • by Cro Magnon ( 467622 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @11:56AM (#32031722) Homepage Journal

    Marvel Comics has an app for the iP*. DC Comics doesn't. I'm sure Steve's anti-Flash policy is to blame.

  • Proprietary content (Score:3, Informative)

    by H0p313ss ( 811249 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:00PM (#32031806)

    I think that Jobs' point is that web content should not be based on a proprietary "standard" .

    Many of us have been saying this for years, building websites with Flash has always been fail. And for my money it always will be.

    That does not mean that I think that everything people do with flash is awful, or that flash developers lack skill or talent. As an average netizen I'm forced to use flash apps and websites if I want to do things like browse recent car models or (until recently) use youtube and I have to say that many of the things I've seen have impressed me. But in the grand scheme of things it gets in the way more than it helps.

    Flash frequently gets used because there's nothing better for a particular task, not because it's the perfect tool or content delivery mechanism.

  • by grapeape ( 137008 ) <mpope7.kc@rr@com> on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:01PM (#32031816) Homepage

    I dont understand why people seem insistent that everything they want should be included in a companies product, its not like there are not other choices. There are tons of phones and tablets out there to choose from, if Flash is a sticking point, why not get a competitors product? If say the Droid started outselling the iPhone don't you think Apple would get the hint and suddenly find Flash was important? If it doesn't happen would you also be able to summize the the masses really don't care? Its a path Apple has chosen, if you don't agree, find something else, its pretty simple.

  • by drolli ( 522659 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:03PM (#32031872) Journal

    Basically what Jobs says is: dont use things which dont work well, even if you kill off some things which work.

    Its the counterexample off microsoft: Never kill things which work, even if some things dont work right.

  • by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Thursday April 29, 2010 @12:11PM (#32032036) Homepage Journal

    Flash on mobile sucks.
    That is true. so far Adobe has failed deliver a good mobile flash solution.
    They produced "Flash lite" which sucks to high heaven.
    I am not an Apple fanboy at all but lets be honest about this.
    Instead of crabbing about Apple not letting Flash on the iPhone why not show us a good Flash experience on say? Windows Mobile? Adobe has had years to produce that. Or on WebOS which they announced about a year ago and still has not seen the light of day. I bet Android would put it on to day if it exists. How about S60 on Nokia devices? I am sure the N95 could run it.......
    Really as far as Flash on the iPhone goes Adobe... PUT UP OR SHUT UP.
    If all we get is another halfbaked Flash-Lite junk program then who cares?
    Over all I am happy that Apple pushed for HTML5 as a solution. Those same sites work just great on my Android phone and my wifes Palm Pre!

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