The great Flash debate

AFTER Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs slammed Adobe's Flash software on Thursday as it falls short for mobile devices, Adobe has replied.

Adobe's chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, wrote in a blog posting soon after: 'This morning, Apple posted some thoughts about Flash on their web site. The primary issue at hand is that Apple is choosing to block Adobe's widely used runtimes as well as a variety of technologies from other providers.

'Clearly, a lot of people are passionate about both Apple and Adobe and our technologies. We feel confident that were Apple and Adobe to work together as we are with a number of other partners, we could provide a terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

'However, as we posted last week, given the legal terms Apple has imposed on developers, we have already decided to shift our focus away from Apple's iPhone and iPad devices for both Flash Player and AIR.

'We are working to bring Flash Player and AIR to all the other major participants in the mobile ecosystem, including Google, RIM, Palm (soon to be HP), Microsoft, Nokia and others.

'We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android smartphones as a public preview at Google in May, and then a general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.'

A Microsoft executive pitched in later, saying while the ubiquity of Flash makes it easy for consumers to access video on the web, the standard has flaws.

'Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security and performance,' said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for the Internet Explorer browser. 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. But Microsoft was more conciliatory toward Adobe than Apple, saying it works closely with Flash engineers to help fix bugs that it finds in the product. -- REUTERS

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