Steve Jobs Is Allegedly Right: Adobe Is Lazy and Insecure

No matter what haters might think of Steve Jobs, who can reasonably deny that Flash is slow, buggy, and a security hazard? Jobs allegedly deprecated Adobe recently, calling the company “lazy.” The Apple CEO is arguably justified in leaving Flash support off the iPhone and the forthcoming iPad.

Steve Jobs’ supposed rant has highlighted one of the prevailing problems with Flash –Adobe is even slower and more insecure than its application that pervades the web. Apple has been bombarded with criticism for not including Flash in its iPhone, but Jobs has a strong rebuttal: when Macs crash, “more often than not it’s because of Flash.” In addition to being buggy, Flash is known to be a resource hog. High definition movies encoded in FLV files take up substantially more CPU resources than other formats. While this may not be an issue for powerful computers, smartphones, handhelds, and weaker netbooks cannot properly process intensive Flash. There is no wonder that Flash 10.1 is still unavailable for Android and other smartphones. Even a speedy device like the 1GHz Snapdragon equipped Nexus One will have difficulty running current versions of Flash –so either Adobe is lazy, or programming a viable form of Flash is no mean feat.

Slow, inefficient, glitchy, and also insecure, Flash is a favorite loophole for hackers. A few days ago, researchers demonstrated that through weaknesses in Flash, they could hack into users running Internet Explorer 7 and 8. This is nothing new for Adobe, whose Reader and Flash applications have widely been targeted for zero-day and many different types of security attacks because they are so easy to exploit.

Inefficient:

The system is a duo 2.8GHz Mac. OS X is not difficult to program for. Ask Adobe why it cannot optimize Flash for such a solid and fast operating system.

To worsen the situation, Adobe’s response is denial. Instead of facing reality, CTO Kevin Lynch declares emphatically that Adobe would never “ship Flash with any known crash bugs.” He then resorts to the circular proposition that “if there [were] such a widespread problem historically,” “Flash could not have achieved its wide use today.”

You may dislike Steve Jobs and find Apple culture overbearing and pretentious, but you must understand the company’s rationale for omitting Flash. OS X and iPhone OS 3 are about stability and security, the antithesis of Adobe’s products. For Apple not to include Flash is a gutsy move because this essentially makes the iPad an even more niche product than it already is. If Flash 10.1 is not any good, I would not be surprised if the iPhone 4G also does not use it, although Android phones will.

Flash Zero-Day Attacks:

Most of us despise Flash advertisements, and we put up with websites laden with Flash content only because it is the established standard, not because the format is actually great. You will notice that Mixr sites feature very limited Flash.

I can only hope that Adobe takes responsibility and fixes its problems. If the company refuses to be objective, then website operators should begin gradually moving away Flash until HTML5 is more prominent. Then we will see if Adobe can rest on its undeserved laurels.

Source: The Register