Fierce Technology

Steve Jobs took some of his time to explain why Flash sucks in a lengthy letter.  He touches on the topics below:

1. Open
2. “Full web”
3. Reliability, security, performance
4. Battery life
5. Touch
6. Third party development

Read the entire letter here.

I do have to admit that Flash really sucked a few years ago.  It kept crashing and was very unstable.  Development was very slow by Adobe, however, things started to improve once the era of Web 2.0 arrived along with YouTube and the sort.   Apple gave some valid reasons to push for open standards like HTML 5 and the general consensus that I’m feeling around the web is that people were left with a bad taste when it comes to Flash.  However, I feel that Apple is being hypocritical when they talk about the words “open” and “proprietary”.  Apple could have made the transition from Flash to HTML 5 smoother by incorporating both standards and phase out Flash as HTML 5 catches on.  Instead, Apple decided to push the less mainstream standard of HTML 5 onto consumers which resulted in a crippled user experience with the iPad and iPhone.  There’s no denial that Flash is dominating for internet browsing currently.  Until HTML 5 becomes mainstream, Adobe’s Flash is here to stay.  Now if only Apple will stop forcing visitors to install Quicktime on their site and use HTML 5…

VIA|Apple