While I already think the nails are in the proverbial coffin for Flash, and it’s no secret I’m happy about that, it hit me that Adobe’s see-no-evil/hear-no-evil attitude with regard to bugs is really the worst thing they could have done and they are much more their own worst enemy than Steve Jobs. Microsoft learned the hard way that they could never control how crappy some of the Windows applications we’re going to be, but that Microsoft would still get the blame if an app crashed all of Windows or other apps (or just slowed everything to a crawl without giving the user a way to kill the offending process).
From a combination of several factors that I don’t want to get into here, Flash is pretty prone to some gnarly developer-caused bugs. To a certain extent this is true of every platform, but what really dooms Flash is two factors:
1) Once something goes haywire, you’re f**ked. That’s it, your computer is going to ground to a halt and your browser will crash or need to be killed/forced quit (force quitted?). In a day and age when we spend increasingly large amounts of time in browsers this goes beyond just annoyance into time and money consumption.
2) Unless you don’t install Flash (or use a blocker) you have no choice but to be subjected to these bugs, because they are in ads. You go to a website looking to a read an article and wham! you just lost that article and anything else you had open in your tabs.
Point 2 is a problem that Microsoft, in large part, never really had (well, there was malware…). It wasn’t like you opened up Word and suddenly Joe Bob Developer’s crappy Windows Dancing Bear app also opened up and caused a Blue Screen of Death. Usually that kind of crash was at least because the user had chosen to run the app. Flash has exposed users to a dumptruck full of bugs that many don’t even know how to avoid.
Adobe should have gone to great lengths in the early 2000s to lock down and compartmentalize individual Flash instances. Now it’s probably way too late.
It’s really no surprise that Jobs wants to keep Flash out of Apple’s mobile ecosphere. Can you imagine people’s reactions if banner ads crashed their phone?
