Adobe Exec Says Mac Flash Improvements Are Coming
Posted 02/17/2010 at 5:54pm
| by Brian Proffit
AppleInsider reports that the war of
words between Apple and Adobe isn't over, but Adobe is trying to play
peacemaker. Responding to reports that during an Apple employee
gathering Steve Jobs said Adobe was lazy and most Mac crashes were
due to Flash, Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, chose to try to soften the
verbal exchange saying, “That's a rumor. I haven't heard that
necessarily he did say that.”
In fact, he said that Adobe welcomes
the kind of frank discussion taking place about Flash. "We're
totally open to hearing feedback like that. And that's one of the
really important things to do in a situation like this, when people
are complaining about something -- not going into internal mode, or
whatever, (but) really listening to what people are saying. We do
that with our customers, we do that with our critics, and often there
are kernels in there that we ought to do something about, and so we
are."
Lynch admitted that Flash video on the
Mac currently eats up a significantly larger percentage of CPU time
than the Windows version, and said they were working hard to improve
that. He pointed to Adobe's Creative Suite as an example of how
committed Adobe was to the Mac platform. Still, the performance
issues (and corresponding battery usage) are widely assumed to be the
reason for the lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad.
One thing is certain: with increasing
browser support for HTML5, content developers no longer need to feel
as committed to Flash as they have in the past.