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Adobe Founders On Flash and Internet Standards
An anonymous reader points out an 18-month-old interview with the founders of Adobe (and creators of PostScript) Charles Geschke and John Warnock, and highlights three interesting quotes from the book Masterminds of Programming that seem very timely now. "'It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we're still living with them. It's always fascinating to see how long it takes for certain pieces of historical antiquity to die away. The more you put them in the browsers you've codified them as eternal, and that's stupid. ... With Flash what we're trying to do is both beef it up and make it robust enough so that at least you can get one language that's platform-independent and will move from platform to platform without hitting you every time you turn around with different semantics. ... You can see why, to a certain extent, Apple and Microsoft view that as a challenge because they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."
Good point, also, appeals to "performance" are short-sighted in computer land. Anything which runs too slow on a computer this year will be butter by next year. Apple is not against flash because its bad, but because once the performance problems go away with the next generation of hardware, Adobe has a platform which can do an end-run around Apple's app-store ecosystem. Its the same kind of logic behind why they don't allow java. If Flash and Java ran in the browser on an iPhone, then you could actually develop high-powered webapps, and run a web-based app store. Not to mention all the cross-platform development. This is especially true since Android is rapidly gaining marketshare, Apple is trying to lock up developers as fast as possible so they won't jump to Android quite as quickly when it inevitably overtakes them, and it is inevitable. There's no way Apple can compete with all the hardware-variety of Android phones. Plus, in a few years there will be Android phones doing something Apple can never do, which is being given away for free with contract. Not to mention Android apps are going to run on tablets and your TV (without any lame pixel doubling).