“Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs sharply criticized Flash, which is used to produce videos and games for many Internet sites on Thursday,” Finkle reports. “Apple has banned Flash from its iPhone and iPad.”
“A Microsoft executive pitched in later that day, saying while the ubiquity of Flash makes it easy for consumers to access video on the web, the standard has flaws,” Finkle reports. “‘Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security and performance,’ said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for the Internet Explorer browser.”
Finkle reports, “He said that Microsoft is backing the same protocols for delivering multimedia content over the Web that Apple is promoting, a group of standards known as HTML5… Meanwhile Adobe dismissed the claims, saying that Apple was simply trying to promote its own products.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple is not “trying to promote its own products.” Apple is quite clearly promoting the open standards HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Adobe’s grasping at air as they fall off the cliff.
Note to advertisers: (including those who advertise via third-party ad networks and become, in effect, our advertisers): Your Flash-based ads are no longer reaching the most well-heeled customers online: 50+ million iPhone owners. They’re also not hitting 35+ million iPod touch users or 1+ million brand new iPad users. If you care about reaching people with discretionary income, you might want to consider dumping your flash-based ads and moving to a more open format that people with money and the will to spend it can actually see.
Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Ask MarketWatch to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Ask CNBC to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
By the way, do not buy Adobe’s Photoshop Elements until you have tried Pixelmator’s free 30-day trial. We use Pixelmator daily.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Frank P” for the heads up.]
Steve Jobs to Adobe:
(SMACK!!) “HTML5, bitch!!“
Strange bedfellows these days.
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Meanwhile Adobe dismissed the claims, saying that Apple was simply trying to promote its own products.”
As opposed to ADOBE just trying to promote ITS product.
You can’t flog Silverlight or Silverlite or Silverfish or whatever Microsoft calls it when Flash is in the way.
Microsoft knows about the issues and they are preparing for the Flash on WM7 failure. When WM7 and Flash player will be released, Microsoft will point the finger for any problems right back at Adobe: “we told you so”
I say we all remove Flash from our Mac computers to speed things up.
Microsoft basically copying Apple? Say it ain’t so!!
Most of the jokers that comment on the full article talk about how well Flash runs on their PCs… They need to read what Apple said again, which was about MOBILE devices, not desktops.
And Microsoft knows a lot about “issues… around reliability, security and performance.”
RIP flash
“Meanwhile Adobe dismissed the claims, saying that Apple was simply trying to promote its own products.”
HTML5! Adobe & managent are a bunch of idiots! lol
It’s time for the Adobe’s CEO to retire. There is just too much bad blood now. Look at what happened at Disney. Eisner got in Steve Jobs crosshairs, he “retired” and now Disney/Pixar is thriving along.
If Adobe was making its own computers then maybe it might have something real to say. But it does not. Adobe in fact needs Apple more than Apple needs them.
Apple has tons of money for R&D;to create any software they choose. Apple is in charge. Apple could lets say, buy Quark, and offer a competitive challenge to InDesign. They could look at and buy a smaller company that creates software similar to photoshop, or any other software in Adobe’s creative suite and offer real alternative.
So please Adobe, wake up. Change CEOs, change direction. Stop being babbling idiots. Apple is spurring innovation, creating new markets and new platforms. Understand that Apple is in charge. Deal with it. Because you will blink first. You will. Just do it get it over with.
By “trying to sell their own products”, (not the best wording), Apple is locking developers into their tools to write apps for their product. That means those developers who can only afford to write for one device, are forced into doing it for iPhone only- which sells their product- the iPhone and iPad and iPod touch.
Not very clear from such a high level statement, but nonetheless true.
Flash is one of many Adobe supplied technologies that has kept the Mac on even or better footing with windows. That is apparently easy for many people to forget. And the fact that Adobe supplied the core technologies that allowed Apple to be in the desktop publishing business that got them where they are today is also apparently easily forgotton!
The question is where is Adobe today? By all I can gather, they are trying hard to make Flash technology great, but hampered by Apple’s refusal to supply them with the rights to use their private APIs for hardware accelerated rendering; these are reserved for use in Quicktime. All other platforms but the Mac OS supply this type of API, and Flash performs well and with little or no extra battery usage on those platforms. If you think Adobe doesn’t care, you are dead wrong. They are being blocked.
So pull your head out of … the reality distortion field.
And SilverLight ? Microsoft backs that too ?
This isn’t surprising at all. Flash directly competes with Silverlight, so Microsoft wants Flash dead.
Microsoft holds 73 of the patents in the MPEG-LA patent pool, so Microsoft benefits financially from the use of MPEG-4 with H.264 encoding. (Apple benefits too from the patent pool).
For HTML5, Flash isn’t an option in the VIDEO tag. The two real options are MP4 with H.264 which is an open and widely developed standard that supports hardware based decoding in a lot of devices, or Ogg Theora which is open source, not widely adopted, and lacks the hardware decoding that most others have adopted.
Oh, and while we may like open source, it’s not a desirable thing in this case due to legal risks associated with it for companies like Apple and Microsoft, but additionally, open source is considered the enemy in general by Microsoft.
Microsoft *is* still allowing the Flash plug-in to be used wherever plug-ins are allowed…just like Apple. As content providers, there’s no friggin way we’re going to continue to use Flash, except as a fall back option for people who are still running decades old versions of IE that they’ve been locked into or are afraid to upgrade (IE 6 still has 25% market share…Grrrrr).
Fortunately, Adobe themselves paved the way to transition off of Flash for video a couple of years ago when they adopted MPEG-4 with H.264 encoding. This allowed content providers such as myself (I have websites with thousands of videos) to offer *one* video file and have it be used in the Flash player as well as link to download or as podcasts in iTunes. These same video files will transition seamlessly into the next era with HTML5. All we have to do as content providers is swap out the Flash based player with HTML5 as the default player (keeping Flash for those without HTML5).
Oh, and Apple should buy Adobe.
PS: My girlfriend gave me an iPad 3G for my birthday. She loves me… she really loves me!!!
Hey Adobe, can you feel the walls closing in?
I’d like to know what the return on investment was for that little $3 billion purchase of Macromedia.
@notreallyagreeing
“The question is where is Adobe today? By all I can gather, they are trying hard to make Flash technology great, but hampered by Apple’s refusal to supply them with the rights to use their private APIs for hardware accelerated rendering”
Apple cannot and does not affect whether Adobe improves their own technology. You are referring to applying said improvements to Apple’s platform.
“All other platforms but the Mac OS supply this type of API, and Flash performs well and with little or no extra battery usage on those platforms.”
I don’t have an Android run phone, but every article on Flash 10.1 is wowed that it does not kill the battery life like the old version. Oh, and it seems like MS thinks that Flash has a few problems on their platform, too. Windows or something.
Apple isn’t stopping anyone from using hardware acceleration. They’re just stopping them from accessing it through middleware. There is a difference.
Adobe is free to develop for iPhone OS all they like, and free to create HTML 5 tools to do so for content creators. But this is not what Adobe wants. Adobe wants to use Flash, to recoup the 3.5 billion dollar investment they made in the platform, and ensure that a large percentage of the video and animation on the web continues to directly profit Adobe.
No one is complaining that Sony isn’t allowing Flash on the Play Station, or that Nintendo isn’t allowing it on the Wii. Why not? Because these are not desktop computing platforms. AND NEITHER IS THE IPAD. This is a new animal with different requirements, instrfaces and features. Adobe doesn’t just get to demand that Flash has to go on any device they deem vital to their own business.
I can remember the heady days of yore (5 whole years ago) when Adobe’s entire business model didn’t depend on Flash the way it seems they want you to believe it does today. Flash has become a monkey on Adobe’s back. I said that before I worked there, I shouted it loudly while I was there, and I wasn’t the only one. But management at the mud hut isn’t listening any more. They have their agenda and reason be damned. Let ’em have it.
-c
@notreallyagreeing
I am guessing you don’t know how little it costs to develop for iPhone/IPod/iPad…..
@MacTony
“I’d like to know what the return on investment was for that little $3 billion purchase of Macromedia.”
Oh, that stings!
@MacTony
They still have dreamweaver
“Apple isn’t stopping anyone from using hardware acceleration. They’re just stopping them from accessing it through middleware. There is a difference.”
Ha- I guess 3rd party software is now termed middleware.
Microsoft got busted for this in the early 90s. They had a communication API that they kept internal and used for their own apps so that they’d work better. Existing tools weren’t given access to the API. They successfully sued MS on grounds that MS was using their OS to sell more of their applications and to disadvantage competition. That is probably not the only example but that’s all I know about.
You are right about the reasons one wouldn’t complain about playstation. But this is MUCH different. The iPhone is not only a platform, it may be the biggest platform really soon.
As far as the macromedia investment- that’s kind of contrived. They have employees, they are building software, they are trying to make profit on what they are building. Yes Adobe put a lot of effort into Flash. It’s a platform in and of itself, and many people do like it and use it. And it transformed the web for all of us, whether you remember that or not.
“They still have Dreamweaver”
Don’t even get me started on that one. As a GoLive user (and lover) is was a sad day when we all realized what the MM buyout meant for GL. What we DIDN’T expect was losing one of the most elegant applications Adobe ever sold – ImageReady.
The logic there was that many of the features of IR were rolled into Photoshop. The problem was that none of the useful ones were. Jave rollovers were out, and were were told to just learn Flash. I tried that, but I found Flash clumsy and confusing, requiring one to write too much code in place of the visual and Photoshop-like tools we had in ImageReady. Adding insult, we lost great GoLive tools like the table layout window and had to deal with the awful port of DW 8 that was very literally thrown into the CS3 box as if an afterthought.
This is what drove me to stop using DW altogether and move my own site to WordPress, which offers a beautiful, more visually oriented interface and writes cleaner code than DW. Now if they’d just get rid of their Flash-based statistics…
“‘Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security and performance,’ said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for the Internet Explorer browser.”
Hardly surprising. It’s the truth and everyone knows it. Adobe has put far more effort into Flash on the Windows platform, so it at least works acceptably over there. But it still has all the problems Hachamovitch mentions. Also, there’s no advantage for Microsoft in being dependent on Adobe’s whims.
Another browser maker, Opera, has just commented, too:
“… at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology. …
“… flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that.”
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/opera-joins-in-jobs-v-flash-argument-687597
“I once saw a man hanging from a cliff,”‘ he said slowly. “‘The brink was crumbling beneath his fingers, and the only thing near enough to grasp was a tuft of grass, a few long blades with roots barely clinging to the rock. The only chance he had of climbing back up on the cliff. So he grabbed it.'” His abrupt chuckle held no mirith. “‘He had to know it would pull free.” quote – Robert Jordan ‘Asmodean to Rand al’Thor’