Adobe Defends Flash, Calls Apple Uncooperative

Adobe chief technology officer Kevin Lynch this week defended Flash as superior to HTML 5 and accused Apple of being uncooperative as it relates to putting Flash on the iPhone or iPad.

"We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on [the iPhone and iPad] 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," Lynch wrote in a blog post.

Apple's upcoming iPad tablet, , will not include Flash support. In a town hall with employees, Steve Jobs reportedly said that Apple avoided Flash on the iPad because Flash is too buggy, and HTML 5 is the wave of the future, according to Wired.

Lynch was not convinced. He said that Flash is currently available on the iPhone via standalone apps like FickleBox and Chroma Circuit – apps that will work on the iPad as well, he said.

The upcoming Flash Player 10.1, meanwhile, will be available on smartphones from all but one of the major manufacturers, including Google Android, RIM's BlackBerry, Nokia, the Palm Pre, and others, Lynch said.

"Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web," he wrote.

But will HTML 5 steal Flash's thunder?

"I don't see this as one replacing the other, certainly not today nor even in the foreseeable future," Lynch wrote. "The productivity and expressiveness of Flash remain advantages for the Web community even as HTML advances."

Adobe supports the evolution of HTML, but HTML cannot "reliably do everything Flash does," Lynch said. "Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75 percent of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."

More than 85 percent of the top Web sites contain Flash content and Flash is running on over 98 percent of computers on the Web, Lynch contended.

In reply comments posted the next day, Lynch addressed reader comments asking about bugs in Flash.

"Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today," Lynch wrote. "Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10."