Steve Jobs visits Wall Street Journal, trashes Flash again

I would like the ability to use Flash on the iPad, but I don't think that not having it is going to ruin the experience for me.

What all the flash apologists tend to forget is this technology is NOT made for touch screen devices. They rely on rollovers and things of that nature that would not work properly on an iphone or ipad, there is no "hovering" to do these kinds of things. flash is a lumbering giant that runs like crap and crashes any browser i use more than any other plugin. anyone who says there is "minimal" reports of flash causing performance issues isn't paying attention, is a flat out idiot, or is a planted adobe shill. take your pick.

i've had an iphone since 2g and i dont miss flash at all. i dont agree with their draconian policies of control with the iphone and soon to be the ipad, but thats why jailbreaking exists!. Anyhow even as a web and flash developer, i will be among the first to dance on its grave whenever it finally dies. If adobe doesn't want to become completely irrelevant they will fix flash on the mac and not make it run like a processor hog piece of crap. If they spent as much time fixing flash as they did complaining to the media about job's anti-flash bias this would have been fixed YEARS ago.

If not for Apple, I may have had the terrible experience of playing free Flash games and watching free Flash videos on my iPad.

Apple Saves Us from Burden of Choice
http://ikidnot.blogspot.com/2010/02/apple-saves-us-from-burden-of-choice.html

Sad thing is that HTML5 runs just as bad on a Mac as Flash does. I've been doing some comparisons between the two, building the exact same simple animation for both platforms, and they turn out to be exactly as heavy on the CPU. Funny thing is that both of them run way better on PC (about 5x more efficient). So this makes me wonder what Steve is doing here, he might just try to cover up Apple's own shortcomings in OSX by bullying Adobe.
Now I have to admit that many Flash application run very heavy on CPU, in most cases this simply caused by the visuals, effects and intelligence of the application, on other cases it's due to bad programming. This does not mean that Flash is a CPU hog, it means that intensive animations and logics simply take up CPU power. This has never really been an issue till we try to run this content on machines with the computing power of a decade ago (like a cellphone or a Mac apparently).
And about Flash crashing a Mac; I've been working with Flash for many years on serveral Macs and to me it simply hardly ever happens. My Mail app crashes more often and I don't even want to start about iPhone apps.

Not sure why SJ can't work with Adobe and resolve the issue. There is a lot of value in Flash and AIR (verses Silverlight). Windows users, with 95% of the market will not abandon Flash. So for the 5% of Mac users to create a alternative solution is silly.
This will only backfire on Apple!

Apple is going to have to work harder to make this argument about HTML 5 being a viable alternative to Flash actually hold water. Theoretically, CSS transforms (e.g the canvass tag) will do what 99% of Flash does (animation) more efficiently but Apple hasn't pulled their weight in developing this open standard fast enough. Open standards typically develop at a leisurely pace and HTML 5 is no exception. Apple could accelerate the process by developing the tools that content developers (different breed of cat than application developers) could use to get this stuff "out there" in order to press the case but it has not done so.

The reality distortion field is simply not wide enough and not strong enough to keep these facts from being considered.

I noticed something with flash on the mac recently. If i played a flash game (bubble tanks 2) in the browser (safari or chrome), my mac was much slower than my pc, which had the same Penryn core as my macbook, but slower.
If I downloaded the .swf and ran the game in the stand-alone flash player (no browser), it was just as fast as my pc.

Could this be a browser issue??

I happen to love Flash. It will undoubtedly get trumped by emerging HTML standards in the future, but Flash is dead simple to code for (providing you have an inkling towards javascript) and has integration of practically everything you want in regards to incorporating outside technologies (XML, data queries, etc.).

The fact that people "hate" Flash is just a testament to the bandwagon thinking. It's not a bad product. It has flaws, sure, but what product doesn't? Security holes are largely caused by its scripting core, but most people should be aware these vulnerabilities occur in any platform be it C++, Java, or, gasp, AJAX.

People stating AJAX is great are correct, however, it has javascript as its primary core language which is just as capable of causing mayhem as Flash is (as well as CPU strain). I'd like to see some sort of actual proof Flash is truly the core-hog people report it to be, compared to similar technologies performing similar functionality as AJAX.

Unfortunately TUAW seems only interested in creating flame-wars rather than insightful reporting on this technology. Show me some benchmark data regarding Flash vs. AJAX vs. alternatives on resource allotment on the Mac platform and I'll believe your constant bashing of this technologies "inevitable end".

Here is my theory on why Apple and Jobs is anti- Flash. The amount of Flash content and media out on the net is astounding! Think of youtube, hulu, other video media sites, and then all of the Flash based games out there.

Apple is trying to protect their App/iTunes Store revenue stream. If they were to allow flash on the iPad/iPhone products a significant amount of people would be consuming their games, and videos through Flash websites rather than App/iTunes Store purchases. How many people purchase "The Office" weekly to watch it on their iPhones? Probably a decent amount, that revenue would dry up if they could watch it on Hulu. Apple is purposely controlling how people retrieve and consume their multimedia on their mobile platforms, its a smart business move on their part.

If Adobe had access to the native OS X Core APIs they could make a killer Flash plug-in for the OS X environment. I think the claim of killing the battery is just mis-directing the real reason why Flash isn't available.

If Jobs keeps trash talking about Adobe, maybe we'll see a Mac OSX 17 without Photoshop - awesome.