If apple would have decided to go with flash I think they would have to compromise on battery performance. They did ask adobe to give them a less power hungry, more stable flash build for ipad, which they didn't. Anyone who uses an apple computer will tell you how ridiculous it is to play flash videos (or anything) on a mac. Your machine will go on hyper-drive, and your browser will crash frequently.
Adobe has a history of working slowly on flash, which had horrible stability along all platforms not too long ago, while its definitely much better on Windows in recent times, it didn't improve much on OSX. Their next release for mobile is already delayed twice AFAIK. I think this speaks volumes about Adobe software development. I am hardly an apple apologist, but if there is anyone to be blamed for the omission of flash on ipad, its adobe.
iPhone was released 3 years ago, and Adobe still doesn't have a good flash player for mobile or mac.
I keep seeing this claim all the time. Flash is a complete resource hog, i agree. But my mac/browser has never crashed because of Flash, since i bought this in 2007. Mind showing me a flash site that could crash my mac/browser?
[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/bringing-improved-support-f... [2] http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash
That's not just Flash sites, that's all sites that crash Firefox, but on a quick skim I couldn't see any that didn't involve Flash.
Software changes over time (both the browser, and the flash plugin, and the flash code deployed on web pages) so asking someone to reference a particular site that will crash your particular browser won't help you understand what's going on. A better idea might be a few clever search strings:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=safari+crash+log+flash
Or, alternatively, you can look at the architecture of chrome and ask why they put tabs in separate processes, and why mozilla is also putting protection in place:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/03/mozilla-prev...
Apple isn't just making a wild conjecture when they say that Flash is the leading cause of browser crashes. They get stack traces sent to them by the crash reporting mechanism, and they get to count how many crashes come from what region of code. Drawn from sample sizes in the millions, this constitutes measurement.
And that is exactly what i am saying. I keep seeing all these people complaining about Flash , but no one has a proof that actually works.
As i mentioned before, Flash is a complete resource hog on the mac but no one here has a solid reproducible proof for "frequent crashes".
I choose not to believe in Apple's claims and numbers, as they are in open war with Adobe now on the issue. Opening up Flash on iPad and iPhone is lost business for app store(if you own an iPad/iPhone, you already know that currently there is no decent html5 application that work properly on these devices.)
http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byurl/Firefox/3.6....
Really? I'm not even an Apple fanboy (only recently started switching to the platform) and if it weren't for all the hoopla I don't think I'd have even noticed it wasn't there. youtube works. There are more free games in the app store than I would probably have time left in my life to play. I suppose now that you mention it, I don't see as many stupid ads when surfing.
Some of us aren't. Some of us are rejoicing that someone has stood up against this blight and completely forbade it from their system.
That they have such a desirable closed curated system is a bit creepy, but at least in this case they are using that power for good.
I hope Apple is the first of many.