Adobe is testing optimized Flash Player beta for the MacBook Air

Don't be silly, Apple didn't provide them with MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro or Mac Mini samples with which to optimize for. Of course they can't just use the existing Core2Duo, Corei5 and Core i7 machines to optimize, they NEED free stuff from Apple.

My comment was in reference to the part of the interview where guy says it's not optimized for MBA because Apple didn't give them samples.

It's the same kind of whining we heard from Narayan when he said "Apple didn't allow Adobe to use the GPU acceleration API's", even though at least 2 workable GPU acceleration API's had been available to them for over a year at that time (OpenCL and GLSL), the latter of which has been in OS X almost since day 1, and both of which would have the enormous benefit of being portable to about every current OS and hardware platform Flash should ever run.

Apparently Adobe expects the whole world to do their job for them, providing hardware and software interfaces on a silver platter. I honestly think Adobe isn't all that bad, they make some very nice software and Flash player on Windows isn't actually that bad. They just took far too much work on them trying to get Flash running everything and should just have sticked with desktop systems and optimize for that. That, and Narayan is a real douche who doesn't seem to care that no-one with just the least bit of technical background can take his excuses seriously.

Purely anecdotal but I disabled flash on my MBP last week. I spend most of my time browsing and key an eye on the battery meter. I feel I get much better battery time and my fan doesn't run nearly as much. I mostly use Chrome but when I see the "missing plugin" message, I fire up the same page in Safari and the vast majority of the time, the content loads as HTML5 (since I disabled Flash in Safari, as well.) I'd like to figure out how to get Chrome to send what message is necessary to the web-site so that it automatically serve up the HTML5. Again, purely anecdotal but seems to be working well for me.

Correct. But that doesn't stop them from firing up the Adobe FUD maxhiine when it suits them. The travesty is that so-called "tech journalists" won't hold Narayen's feet to the fire when he won't respond to the questions being asked.

For web experiences to improve, we need both Flash and HTML5.

HTML5 is a standard. Like any standard, they make basic innovations standard across all browsers. Yes, HTML5 plays video, but you're not going to see much of it on any sites with high value content because it offers no way to secure the content, which is a big deal for TV and Film distributors.

HTML5 is great, but Flash should stick around and do what it does best: innovate new web features. Standards like HTML5 should do what they do best: standardize popular innovations across all platforms.