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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

In the midst of the iPad Flash controversy I think people are overlooking that Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007. They missed their promise to deliver a beta for the Android and WebOS platforms in 2009. Android support is now projected for mid-2010. Since 2007 Apple has released 3 major versions of their iPhone OS, Google has announced, developed, and released a SmartPhone OS with 2 major revisions. Apple developed, announced, and will release the iPad before Adobe ships a modern mobile Flash for a large variety of devices. Linux & OSX support for Flash on the desktop is still subpar. If you think Flash is good or bad there are serious questions here about Adobe's ability to simply support this platform that is so widely relied on by developers.

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Precisely. Not to mention the wonderful little easter egg that is flash-cookies which the user has no control over or visibility into. Adobe has let most of it's constituencies down.

I didn't know about flash cookies. That's a mini scandal.

Here's Adobe's terrible UI for viewing and deleting your Flash cookies: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...

That's actually bookmarked as the first item in my Firefox toolbar. Use it regularly, though also using the Better Privacy FF add-on. .

At least there's some hope:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...

"Flash Player 10.1 abides by the host browser's "private browsing" mode, where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content. Private local shared objects behave like their public variants as long as Flash Player is in memory and local shared objects created during private browsing are removed when returning to public browsing mode. Existing shared objects are preserved but inaccessible until private browsing is turned off. Libraries in the Flash Player cache, like the Adobe Flex® framework, are unaffected by private mode. Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. No developer action required."

Adobe have had years and years to produce a well performing Flash for Mac OS X. They have done absolutely nothing besides pulling a straw mans argument about lack of hardware support.

With this history in mind, why do people think that Apple would trust Adobe all of a sudden would produce a well performing implementation for the iPad/iPhone?

Steve Jobs claims you will get "the entire internet" on the iPad, even though Flash, Silverlight, and other technologies are not present.

Who's being dishonest about this? Is Adobe really pulling a strawman? I support Adobe's claim of Apple's passive interference in OSX since it obviously exists in the iPhone OS.

I opted to use Adobe Air for a new project a year (or two maybe) ago. At the time Adobe's was making lots of waves at the speed of their JIT compiler and support for platforms like Linux had improved (at least slightly). Now I'm thinking Adobe just hasn't delivered on any of the promise it showed back then. I think they have themselves to blame, and there certainly seemed like there was a time when Apple really wanted flash on the iPhone and they just didn't deliver.

- - Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007.

Flash Player 9.4 is shipping on the Nokia N900, and works pretty nicely in the standard browser. Wouldn't that count as a major upgrade? (It's still one version behind the desktop counterpart, but at least it supports all the features of Flash 9 instead of a Lite subset.)

That "Player 9.4" is a bit of an odd bird. Nokia was insistent, a few years ago, on showing the world's real webpages on a pocket device -- they were the first to want to do desktop-style browsers and plugins, rather than Flash applications or native UIs on mobile. I didn't believe it could be done, but I did use an N700 when it became available.

From what I understand, Nokia adapted an older Adobe Linux codebase to the smaller device, and implemented it as a plugin to their browser. Nokia is currently a major partner in the Open Screen Project, and is poised to take advantage of the mobile optimizations in the upcoming Player 10.1 release.

So, oddly, I'd tend to agree with the earlier poster, than we haven't seen fruits of Mobile Flash work recently. But now in Jan10, it's almost showtime.... ;-)

Adobe's development strategy in general seems to be to release v1.0 of something...then pile crap on top of it for as long as possible hoping that Moore's law helps them out.

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...

True on the schedules. In 2008 Flash's mobile and desktop teams merged, to create a common runtime codebase across device form-factors. The Open Screen Project has a dramatically wide range of collaborators... one of the most massive examples of cross-company scheduling I've ever seen.

Mobile World Congress is in Barcelona in February. That should be the coming-out party for the entire next generation, and shipments will ramp up through 2010.

I recommend you dig just a little deeper before slamming Adobe. On one hand you praise Android et al for releasing so many major revisions, yet slam them for not keeping up on each of those platforms and revisions (i.e. the moving target paradox).

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