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Adobe claims they don't ship Flash with known crash bugs, user proves they do
Apple's recent iPad product announcement fanned the flames of the Flash debate, namely whether it belongs on Apple's mobile devices -- or not. Since the release of the iPhone Apple has been staunchly against putting Flash on its mobile devices, citing performance and stability issues. In fact at an Apple Town Hall meeting just over a week ago, Steve Jobs said, "When a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash." It doesn't get much more blunt than that.
Adobe, of course, is crying foul, and their chief technology officer Kevin Lynch responded by making the grandiose statement that "Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today."
Unfortunately, Matthew Dempsky begs to differ, and he can prove it. Before you click that link, you should know that unless you are running the very latest beta version of Flash, it will crash either the Flash plugin, or your entire browser, depending on what browser you are using. The thing is, Dempsky found this crashing bug in September of 2008 and reported it to Adobe then, and the bug has continued to exist in every version of Flash on every platform since.
Lynch's comment is what you'd expect any CTO to say publicly; realistically, what else could he say? It's just very unfortunate for him that someone was able to prove the inaccuracy of his statement in a very compelling way.
If you're tired of Flash giving you troubles, check out the various solutions we've presented by searching Download Squad for "flash block" or "disable flash".
[Update] Adobe has now acknowledged Dempsky's bug report, and has offered an explanation for why it has taken so long to fix it. The explanation is reasonable, but likely won't do anything to dampen the rising level of distaste for Flash that is becoming evident in the online community.
Comments
23
Subscribe to commentsdbmuseFeb 8th 2010 10:13PM
on my macbook pro 4,1 running osx 10.6.2
Neither Safari or Firefox crashed
I have flash 10.0.42.34
don't suppose the yellow screen 27 in imacs
are caused by lazy apple programmers
writing buggy software
do ya ?
gusFeb 9th 2010 3:39PM
Anyone who thinks that this has to do with stability and not controling platform publishing is a kool-ade guzzling fool. Apple maintains an iron fist on apps publishing on iPad and iPhone. This anti-Flash publicity is just a diversion.
It should not be possible to crash an OS with a user space application, so blaming Flash for Apple crashes is a joke. It MIGHT rarely bring down a browser in an extreme case but this can be tested for by the developer. It's teh ability to publish / deploy that's key.
It's just amazing that Apple is prepared to do Microsoft's dirty work for them, never in their wildest dreams could Microsoft have hoped to so damage one of the few truly cross platform options out there, and for what? So Apple can paste a fig-leaf over their own ruthless platform control and closed computing devices.
ZivaqueFeb 25th 2010 7:35PM
It crashed both IE 7 and Firefox 3.5.8