Flash Fires
Arguments have flared up recently about the Adobe Flash plugin on the Macintosh. I’ve been rather vocal about the issue lately by Tweeting my views about the entire debacle; I have written bits about Flash’s and Adobe’s general incompetence here; and I have made comments in weblogs where I find it an effective platform to get my views heard by those who matter. I and others like me have been nothing but insulted by the Adobe Flash team for our viable and extremely genuine problem.
I will say imperatively that I absolutely abhor Flash. I can’t express in words my undying hatred for it, but I don’t despise the plugin because it’s not a web standard; it has so far filled a void that web standards have been incapable of filling and as of right now can’t fill. I detest it because it’s unstable, inaccessible, and inefficient. It does absolutely nothing but attenuate my browsing experience by either crashing the browser or bringing my computer to a screeching halt by devouring its available resources to display something as minute as a 320×240 video. If the Adobe Flash team were to remedy the capriciousness and incompetence of the program then my convictions about Flash would take a complete 180° turn toward outpouring support for their product if and only if when it doesn’t impede the expansion of web standards. However, they’ve refused to do so. The Adobe Flash team have done nothing but insult their users pointing fingers at people and other corporations as the source of their problems when evidence presents itself proving it’s everything to the contrary.
This past Sunday paraphrased transcripts of the iPad town hall meeting at Apple were released, and Steve Jobs didn’t have much that was nice to say about Adobe:
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
Steve Jobs sites Flash’s instability as the reason why none of Apple’s iPhone-like devices are able to execute Flash. I have been throwing around a theory for some time that stated that Apple didn’t want Flash near their products because Adobe was incapable of programming a stable release for the Macintosh. Steve’s statements have proved my theory to be true.
Mr. Jobs also calls Adobe out on being lazy. I thoroughly agree with that, however, all of Adobe isn’t indolent. Anyone who has attempted to install Adobe CS3 or CS4 absolutely have much scorn for the installer. The Installer Team have taken the complaints to heart and gone above and beyond to fix the installer. A much improved installation process will be present for CS5. Likewise, complaints about Flash UI extensions in CS4 and the severe lack of extensions being developed have caused the Creative Suite team to allow the use of WebKit for UI extensions in CS5. Now if the Creative Suite Team would submit more than one or two bug fixes for their software things would be perfect on that front. What does the Adobe Flash team do? Instead of doing what their colleagues at Adobe have done they instead point fingers at their own users and at Apple for the source of their application’s troubles. Adobe itself isn’t lazy, but the Flash team sure is.
Adobe’s executives and managers could be called lazy for not firing their employees who refuse to do their jobs such as John Dowdell and Lee Brimelow who have done nothing but spread lies and malcontent over this issue. The problems with the Adobe Flash plugin began long before Adobe acquired it by purchasing Macromedia. After nearly a decade of having to deal with an unstable plugin it’s about damn time it’s fixed. Adobe’s developed it for four years of the nearly 9 year period of misery. Instead of accepting Steve’s reasons for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad’s lack of support for Flash they instead claim it’s still Apple’s fault. If it was Apple’s fault then Flash would work wonderfully on Linux like it does on Windows; it hardly works at all on Linux. So, Adobe, is Flash’s incompetence Linux’s fault as well? Adobe also claims that Apple doesn’t cooperate. Apple had absolutely no trouble cooperating with Adobe during the PowerPC to Intel conversion, letting Adobe in on Rosetta months before the masses even knew Apple was switching architectures. Adobe was given immense amounts of lead time to work with Apple to make sure that all of Adobe’s applications ran smoothly (including the Flash plugin), and when bugs arose in Rosetta months down the road which caused rounding errors in Illustrator among other incredibly annoying problems Apple worked with Adobe yet again to remedy the problem in short order. Like with Rosetta, Apple would benefit from a stable Flash plugin on the Macintosh, but I’m sure it’s difficult for Apple to cooperate now when Adobe’s doing nothing but badmouthing the company and its policies. Instead of whining and posting false information about website support on the iPad they could fix their plugin and hope to God that Apple would be merciful and willing to allow Flash on the devices and others it produces like it. Regardless the Adobe Flash Team is doing a great job at tarnishing Adobe’s fading reputation as it’s almost fashionable to give Adobe a good tongue lashing over Flash these days. That’s a good thing because they’ve deserved it for several years now.
Apple’s not without fault in their relationship with Adobe. H.264 hardware decoding isn’t in the Flash plugin on the Mac because there are no open API’s on the platform for decoding; they’re specific to QuickTime. Apple definitely should work with Adobe, providing them with a way to decode video on their plugin. However, the absence of hardware decoding isn’t the source of the Flash plugin’s sluggishness at rendering video when there’s other players on the platform without hardware decoding capable of displaying H.264 video without crippling the computer in the process. Additionally, back when Apple announced they were dropping support for 64-bit in Carbon Adobe was caught by surprise, having spent countless hours developing its CS4 suite for deployment in 64-bit. This lack of communication by Apple caused its users to receive a 32-bit only release of Creative Suite 4 applications; none of it was Adobe’s fault like some have claimed. Some good is coming out of this because if Carbon was 64-bit in Mac OS X Adobe wouldn’t have a reason to rewrite their entire suite in Cocoa which provides better system integration among other benefits from the aging Carbon API’s.
There was a time where the name Adobe was synonymous with great software and great customer support and communication. This is hardly the case anymore. Reports have come back by people who attended Apple’s town hall meeting about the iPad which said that Steve Jobs was almost nostalgic about the Adobe of old. That’s what Adobe needs to be again. They need to listen to their customers’ concerns, keep the employees who do their job, and fire the ones who don’t like the ones who are in charge of maintaining the Flash plugin.