Gruber: Apple tablet likely won’t support Adobe’s Flash

“What about Flash? Lots of people are speculating that The Tablet will run an updated version of iPhone OS. If that’s true, then it almost certainly won’t support Flash. Me? I think The Tablet is going to be running its own Whatever-the-Name-of-the-Tablet-Is OS — but if I had to bet, I’d bet on it not supporting Flash, either,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball.

“Why? For most of the same reasons why I don’t expect the iPhone OS ever to support Flash,” Gruber writes. “Flash is the leading cause of application crashes on Mac OS X. It is buggy. It’s inefficient. Presumably The Tablet is going to have a faster CPU and more RAM than an iPhone, but that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t going to treat CPU cycles and memory as any less precious than they do on the iPhone.”

Gruber writes, “As I wrote in February 2008, correctly predicting that Apple would not be adding Flash support to iPhone OS: ‘As it stands today, Apple is dependent on no one other than itself for the software on the iPhone. Apple controls the source code to the whole thing, from top to bottom. Why cede any of that control to Adobe?'”

“To my knowledge, Apple controls the entire source code to the iPhone OS,” Gruber writes. “That’s not to say they wrote the whole thing from scratch. Many low-level OS components are open source. But they have the source. If there’s a bug, they can fix it. If something is slow, they can optimize or re-write it. That is not true for Mac OS X, and Flash is a prime example. The single leading source of application crashes on Mac OS X is a component that Apple can’t fix.”

There’s much more in the full article, “Tablet Musings,” here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MacVicta” for the heads up.]