1. More Adobe Suckiness

    While I’m on a rant against Adobe and Flash, I figure I may as well comment on Adobe’s latest shenanigans in which they try to drum up dissent against Apple for not allowing Flash on the iPhone. Engadget has the details. The comments are full of idiots literally defecating in their own pants in a fits of rage over not being able to use Flash on their iPhone.

    Now, as far as I know, there’s no phone out there that runs Flash. There’s a couple that run Flash Lite, but that’s a completely different beast and nothing like Flash on the desktop at all. It’s literally just an interface layer and simply can not handle the kind of flash content you get on the web. But I don’t think anyone really cares about that. They just want to stamp and scream and shout until they get what they want. No matter how stupid it is.

    I was over the moon when I found out Flash wouldn’t work on the iPhone, and I almost wet myself with glee when Apple repeatedly told Adobe to go forth and multiply every time they whinged and cried like little girls because they weren’t invited to the party. And here’s why.

    Flash runs like crap on a Mac. If you own a Mac, open up Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities) then go to any Flash powered website (BBC iPlayer or Hulu should do the trick) and watch the Flash player start to eat up all your CPU cycles. If you’re on a Mac Book of any sort, you might want to make sure you don’t have it resting on your lap as it’s about to get crazy hot down there as Flash literally sodomizes your hardware.

    The point to take note of here is that there’s nothing wrong with your Mac. It’s working just fine. It’s doing everything the Flash player tells it to do. It’s just that Flash is telling it to do a lot of stupid shit. And that’s the problem. Flash is simply a bad product. Adobe know this, they made it, they know as well as anyone how it runs on a Mac, but they just don’t care. It also runs like a dog on a Windows machine too, but they apparently put some extra special magic in there to screw over OS X users.

    And the fun doesn’t stop at the CPU. The very nature of Flash and Flash powered projects makes them prone to memory leaks, which will gobble up RAM with gay abandon. It’s also worth mentioning at this point that the iPhone doesn’t support Java either for pretty much the same reasons… but then who cares about Java these days?

    If Flash were to make it onto the iPhone, it would be the same bug filled resource hog that it is on the desktop, and in turn it will eat your battery and crash repeatedly. It has no place on an iPhone. It has no place anywhere.

    And what do we need Flash for anyway? Currenlty, it’s used to serve up Video, Audio or Banner Ads. Yeah yeah, you can make entire websites with it too, but there’s a reason Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Ffffound, Quantcast, and the vast majority of the rest of the top 100 websites don’t use flash. Because it sucks at websites, it sucks at web standards and it sucks at accessibility.

    But Mobile Safari (the iPhones web browser) does support HTML 5, which comes complete with the Audio and Video tags. And it supports H.264 video, which is vastly superior to Flash video. So all you’re left with is a shit load of advertising that depends on Flash. Pffft, no big loss there then.

    On top of all that, Mobile Safari also supports the totally boss awesome Canvas tag, which kicks the crap out of Flash in my opinion. In fact, I would not be surprised if at some point in the near future Apple released a Canvas Tag framework to completely replace Flash, which would not only be great for the iPhone, it would be great for the web as a whole.

    Oh, and there’s always Cocoa Touch, which um… well, it’s not even fair to compare the two. Seriously, Flash doesn’t even come close.

    But anyway, the point is, Flash is really really bad. You don’t want it on your iPhone. You don’t want it on any phone. You don’t even want it on your desktop computer. I know, I work with it. I build those crappy Flash websites. I’m a black belt in Actionscript. And I’m telling you, you’re better off without it. It’s what I tell people that offer me money to use Flash, that’s how bad it is.

    But for those people that still think their lives would be better with Flash on the iPhone, I’ll sum it up thusly; Be careful what you wish for, you fucking idiots.