“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.]
So, it is Ok to use Flash as a tool to create cartoons or movies, (Wade, that’s a good use for it) as long as the final output doesn’t involve having to use Flash to run it (flv or swf). OK cool. Still no alternative programs to use?
Sorry Wade I meant alansky. As an artistic tool it’s great, for simple one frame after the other movies. Final product being a H264, mov or mp4 no worries, who knows where it came from. I agree the scripting and coding can be a pain. I don’t do a lot of that interactive stuff. But it should simply be a matter of installing the free plugin to make things work.
The big reasons Flash Sucks:
1) Flash is a massive CPU hog. Now that I can stop Flash from loading into web pages, I no longer have my Mac running its fan non-stop trying to cool the abused CPU. This problem is entirely able to be controlled in code. Adobe, however, are too lazy to bother limiting Flash access to the CPU after animations/movies have played. They just keep on eating the CPU for lord knows what. Incredibly sloppy coding.
2) Flash is NOT secure, even to this day. Adobe have the ability to stop this problem as well. Instead they have what are called ‘Flash Cookies’ on by default. The easy solution is a simple note asking if the user would like to allow any one particular Flash file to put data on the user’s computer, one Flash file at a time. Adobe are crap when it comes to security lately, both in their coding and in their responsiveness to security holes, both reported and exploited. Shameful.
3) Like it or not, nothing bombs a web browser faster or more often that Flash. This is Apple’s own assertion. It is also consistently my experience, even in the latest version of Safari, which is supposed to be using memory sandboxing. I can’t speak for Safari’s problems. But I can tell you that it doesn’t matter what browser you use. Flash will kill it. Again, this is just plain old sloppy coding at Adobe. I have no doubt that Flash has inherent memory leaks in its base coding. Certainly buffer over runs are the general bane of ALL modern coding. But the Flash solution rests with Adobe.
Conclusion:
Adobe are incredibly sloppy and lazy. Yes, Adobe inherited the base code from Macromedia. Yes, Macromedia may well have provided crap Microsoft quality commenting in the code making it nasty to comprehend and update. But we are talking about out one of the most profitable application developers in history who are essentially making the Internet into a bad experience because of the faults of Flash. Adobe seriously need to clean up the mess that is Flash code.
@derekcurrie
Amen brother! You nailed it. Bye-bye flash.