Steve Jobs Says Flash Sucks
March 6, 2008 – 3:32 pmWell, actually he didn’t. When CNet initially reported on the last Apple shareholder meeting, his comments about Flash on the iPhone, buried in a list of bullet points, seemed innocent enough:
Turning back to the iPhone, don’t expect support for Adobe’s Flash technology anytime soon. The full-blown PC Flash version “performs too slow to be useful” on the iPhone, and a mobile version called Flash Lite “is not capable of being used with the Web,” Jobs said. Without an option that falls in between, it sounds like Flash is not going to be supported on the iPhone until the performance of the underlying hardware improves.
For some reason the tech press picked this up as a full-scale smackdown. Kind of strange since a more rational way of interpreting his remarks would be to conclude that the iPhone is to blame, since it is too slow to run Flash properly. I friggin’ love my iPhone but it is kind of slow, even when running plain old JavaScript. When I last wrote about this, I cited an article in iPhone Atlas (another CNet property) that backs up Jobs’s assertions on every point, including the fact that Flash Lite is used by cellphone vendors as a tool for developing slick mobile user interfaces, not as a lightweight replacement for Flash on the web. It’s probably true that someone in a secret lab in the bowels of Cupertino has a Flash prototype running on the iPhone, but that doesn’t mean that it’s ready for primetime consumption, theories of a devious corporate blood feud notwithstanding.
Here’s my theory: Jobs felt the need to explain why Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone, so he did. How boring.
8 Responses to “Steve Jobs Says Flash Sucks”
Do you need Steve Jobs to tell you that/if Flash sucks or not?
Flash does suck you know, for a multitude of reasons:
- proprietary
- binary, obfuscated
- limited availability
By Damjan on Mar 6, 2008
Silverlight…
By john on Mar 6, 2008
Damjan, did you read his previous post?
http://browsing.justdiscourse.com/2008/02/27/more-on-the-open-web/
By Jos on Mar 6, 2008
The question is whether Apple will look to SVG as an alternative for Flash. SVG is lightweight, open standard, and is already supported by Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
I’ve speculated about this on my blog. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Daniel
Opera Software
By Daniel Goldman on Mar 7, 2008
flash does not suck. Although it is cpu intensive so it would hard to get on the iphone
By jordan on May 18, 2008
Flash is for lazy developers who value beauty over substance and for megacorporations that are run by CEOs who call tech support to find out where the power button is every 5 years when they turn on their IBM 8086s or Macs at home.
By Computer Scatter on Sep 17, 2009
Flash conceptually does not suck, nor does the additional functionality it provides.
Up to Flash 5 or so, it clearly was a great technology, and back then (that was 2001 or so), it offered pretty much anything one could desire, or already too much.
Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to develop anything in Flash, because it’s so incredibly complicated (all that OO/Interfaces/Classes shit), convoluted, bloated, and incomprehensible. I hate my life for 3 entire days after “developing” 10 minutes in Flash and running into countless, totally ridiculous problems that I don’t have in any other programming environment or any other platform.
The bottom line is: Flash itself is a great idea, developing for Flash however sucks bigtime.
By Alexander Ewering on Mar 1, 2010
absolutely flash sucks…adobe has turned a good app into a complete mess…as they have done with most of the stuff they publish…macromedia once had a really nice app…adobe came along and destroyed it…kind of like microsoft buying up and destroying once great app producers and turning their software into shyte…wtg adobe!
By CALender on Apr 6, 2010