There's been a lot of discussion lately around Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash. I read it, laughed and then stopped. In reality, I can't fault Apple for not allowing Flash on the iPad, if you're going to accepted an application that is restricted in as many ways as the iPad is and not having Flash is your biggest problem, then you're having a good day. Flash, like most Adobe products these days, increases the risk to any system it's installed on, not only because Adobe doesn't seem to have grasped security but because everything you add on increases the attack surface and therefore increases the risk.
That being said, I don't really want to be involved in this discussion because both Apple and Adobe have way too many fanboys and that's just a bad place to go. I do, however, have to share something that made me laugh.
After Mr. Jobs went on and on about supporting HTML5 and embracing it as the new standard, I decided to take it for a drive on my iPad. The HTML5 Gmail interface rocked, and HTML5 Youtube was pretty nice as well but that's where the good times stopped. Next I tried to visit the APIRocks HTML5 presentation and was rather surprised when safari crashed. No messages, no pop-ups, and no additional iPad problems... simply Safari closed and I was returned to the home screen. This seems like a bit of an 'oopsie' given how strongly Apple is pushing the "HTML5 instead of Flash" argument.
Check out the video of it happening:
*Poor video quality can be the Blackberry it was recorded with.
*The 20 seconds of sitting at the end of the video can be blamed on YouTube (they don't exist in the original)
