Public spat
One of the initial criticisms of Apple's new iPad was that it doesn't support Adobe Flash - considered by most to be the default online video and animation platform.
However, soon after the launch, Steve Jobs was reported as saying that Adobe is lazy and that Apple doesn't support Flash because it's so buggy. He also opined that Flash will eventually become obsolete as the world moves to HTML 5, which aims to render rich content plug-ins like Flash unnecessary.
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch indirectly responded to Jobs' disses in a blog post. In it he pointed out that Flash is used by 85 percent of the top websites, is installed on 98 percent of PCs, and is used for the majority of casual games, video and animation on the web.
He conceded that all the new mobile Internet devices cropping up create new challenges for Flash, but that Adobe is on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones to all but one of the top manufacturers (and, by inference, operating systems). He also pointed out that Adobe has recently enabled standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash.
Lynch also addressed the HTML 5 issue (and the standard is being driven, perhaps not incidentally, by an employee of Google and an employee of Apple), and said he doesn't see it as one replacing the other. "If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort," he said, somewhat disingenuously.
"Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers," he added, and he does have a point there. HTML 5 videos use the H.264 codec, which isn't supported by Firefox or Opera.
