Ugh. More Flash. Do not read.

James Alliban, who recently made a name for himself with FLAR (Flash Augmented Reality) rails against the notion that Flash is shit.

This ignores the facts that a lot of people were already using a Flash blocker, like Click2Flash, before Steve Jobs gave his opinions on Flash. Why? Because Flash has proven itself to be pretty shit.

I didn’t need Steve Jobs to tell me that Flash was shit. I had personal experience of it. I’ve had Click2Flash installed for months because I finally got sick of how bad performance was.

Adobe doesn’t like this and have put a lot of marketing effort into making sure that everyone knows how unfair Apple has been. You have to ask yourself that if Apple is saying they get more bug reports and crash reports from Flash than anything else on Mac OS X, then why would they lie? You have to consider which company you trust more (assuming there’s any trust for either).

So Adobe says their Flash platform is pristine.

This ignores the fact that it’s taken Adobe 10 years to catch up to Mac OS X’s APIs and no-one has any shred of confidence that they’ll be able to keep up with the iPhone OS APIs – to put it another way, they’re already out of date now and they’ll be further out of date with the release of iPhone OS 4. That means no multitasking, no Game Center, no Core Data and probably no MapKit.

This ignores the facts that Flash is a security risk. Adobe may say that it had the second fewest security holes of all Internet technologies listed but the severity of those security holes is an important factor, as is the proliferation of outdated software (like when Adobe were shipping a compromised version of Opera within their suite).

This ignores the obvious performance burden of Flash. Adobe may say that “Flash performs as well as, if not better than, comparable multimedia technologies” but Flash makes my computer more burdened than when playing a fully immersive 3D game. The fans come on sooner, the machines heats up quicker. For tiny animations this is just not right. Adobe’s own comparisons are not even comparing like for like.

And why is Adobe so upset that Apple has restricted Flash when they say on their web page that:

we actively support technologies like HTML4, HTML5, CSS, and H.264, in addition to our own technologies.

So support these technologies and support them well and don’t get embroiled in this debate. So you’ve lost Flash on iPhone and iPad – move on. There’s no antitrust argument here, there’s no monopoly here (unless you can have a monopoly on “who makes the coolest devices”).