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Steve Jobs Publishes Some "Thoughts On Flash"
teh31337one writes "Steve Jobs just posted an open letter of sorts explaining Apple's position on Flash, going back to his company's long history with Adobe and expounding upon six main points of why he thinks Flash is wrong for mobile devices. HTML5 naturally comes up, along with a few reasons you might not expect. He concludes in saying that 'Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice.'"
Tacky that his first point is that Flash is proprietary, when Apple restricts the apps that can be installed on the phone. Pot, meet kettle.
And for those who care about the original source, it's right here on Apple's website.
Both Engadget and CNET are too afraid of sending precious ad clickers away from their site to link to the original of course.
He's not blasting Adobe for being closed, he's blasting them for going around telling everyone how open they are when that's not true.
He fully admits that Apple has lots of proprietary stuff. In that same letter. Whatever merits that Flash might have that would warrant Apple supporting it on the iPhone, it being an open system is not one of them, and so Adobe should try to make more useful arguments.
Not that it'll matter to Jobs.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Get over it. Apple lavished praise on KHTML--by name--when Safari was released SEVEN years ago. They were explicit on why it was chosen over Gecko. One of those reason was it was SMALL at under 140,000 lines of code. "SMALL?" Sound familiar? It was a COMPLIMENT, not a dismissal of KHTML.
The Apple haters need to come down out of the bell tower. It's clear many on /. didn't even get to the second paragraph of what Steve had to say.
There's a marked difference between a web standard that anyone can implement, like HTML5, and Flash. Flash sucks on Mac OS X, Steve isn't shining anyone one. Flash routinely blows up its browsers and sucks CPU cycles like a starved vampire on Mac OS X. I've read it's not so great on Linux either. OK, given these FACTS, why do you want to perpetuate the 3rd party Flash when an comparable open standard is available? Want Flash on another OS? Gotta wait for Adobe and it might even suck.
I've noted most folks forget that Apple has been on both sides of things. They've lost control of the tool chain such as when Metroworks Codewarrior was the standard for Mac classic development. They've done "write once run elsewhere" as NeXT with OpenStep on Windows, on Solaris and the OPENSTEP/Mach OS. They've seen how Java evolved.