Flash crash — Steve Jobs is spot-on
No, not the stock market.
The recent very public noise about Adobe Flash on iPad caused Steve Jobs to post a letter explaining Apple’s approach. One reason you’ll never see Flash on this site is that it’s not only a godawful user experience, when my browser crashes, guess what’s responsible? It’s almost always Flash; if it’s not busy sucking up a huge amount of CPU time, then it gets bored and crashes the browser. Or it’s another open security risk that is being actively exploited. I want a checkbox in the browser to disable it entirely.
Hallelujah Steve, your refusal to accept Flash on iPad has immediately forced a major industry move towards far better technologies like HTML5. Billions of internet users will benefit from your keen judgment, and trillions of crashes will be averted in future years. Who the hell would want to destabilize a hot new product with a product with a dismal track record? Not to mention that amazing new web applications will happen in HTML5, not even feasible in Flash. Now if only the same could be done for Microsoft Windows.
Update: I hit a nerve with a Windows user on this one. I'm told that it's all because Steve Jobs is pissed off at Adobe from something that happened 15 years ago, and that Macs cost 2-3X as much as PCs, and that Flash crashes because Apple won’t give Adobe secret API support to make Flash go faster (a non-sequitor of course). And that Flash never crashes PCs (except that Windows users tell me it does). And that I have a Mac bias. I guess that means I have an iPad bias also.