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.