SAN FRANCISCO - MAY 13: A full page ad by Adobe
Systems is displayed on the back of the San Francisco
Chronicle business section May 13, 2010 in San
Francisco (Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
-”In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.”
-”Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath.”
In other words, Adobe was offering a mediocre technology that wasn’t able to stand up to the demands of smartphone users – or at least those who were not in the mood to smash their heads against the wall when their pages crapped out because of Flash’s idiosyncrasies. The missive was written to rationalize Apple’s decision to no longer allow apps compiled with Flash to run on the iPhone, iPod, or the iPad.
Adobe press release
ZDNet: Flash is dead: Long live HTML 5?
Adobe was understandably aghast and responded with a public relations offensive, framing this as a question of industry politics and open access with Apple playing the role of the heavy.
“We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen,” Kevin Lynch, the company’s chief technology officer, wrote at the time in a public post. For good measure, he added that those who suggested HTML “as eventually supplanting the need for Flash” were wrong. “I don’t see this as one replacing the other, certainly not today nor even in the foreseeable future.”
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