The best way for Adobe to save Flash is by killing it

Feb 02, 2010, 00:03 (2 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Steven Wei)

"Having done several years of Flash development and having worked with many Flash developers, the recent controversy between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPad is very amusing to me. First, there are a few arguments that I want to address directly: But Flash is the only way to deploy a consistent cross platform solution!

"Shenanigans. Balderdash. I’ve deployed Flash apps to both OS X and Linux environments. Let me tell you, it’s not pretty. The OS X Flash implementation is a second class citizen compared to the Windows Flash implementation, and the Linux Flash implementation is a third class citizen. I completely understand why this is the case (obviously as a company it makes sense to allocate more development resources towards your largest userbase). But the problem remains, and the OS X/Linux Flash players are nowhere near the same level of performance and stability as the Windows version. Given the allocation of resources distributed towards each player implementation, I doubt they will ever be.

"(Programmer digression) For example, my ‘favorite’ OS X Flash player limitation is the fact that it will always return HTTP status codes of 0 whenever you make an URL request. Want to follow 302 redirects like any sane application interacting over HTTP needs to do? Sorry, you’ve got to roll your own!"

Complete Story

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