Slash LaneIn an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, Shantanu Narayen said that Adobe is looking to improve battery life on the MacBook Air with a new custom build of Adobe Flash, currently in beta testing in the company's labs. According to Engadget, he noted that battery life performance depends on hardware acceleration.
"When we have access to hardware acceleration, we've proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform," he said.
His comments come after testing of the new MacBook Air found that ditching Flash improved battery life by two hours. The new notebook gets six hours of uptime loading pages in the Safari browser, but that dips to four hours once Adobe Flash is installed.
Apple caused a stir in October, when it released its newly redesigned MacBook Air models, but shipped them without the Flash plugin preinstalled. Apple portrayed the change as an advantage to consumers, as leaving the user to install Flash ensures they have the latest version.
Apple and Adobe have been at odds in 2010, in a feud that gained considerable steam after Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs published an open letter criticizing Flash as old technology that is unfit for the modern era of mobile computers. Apple does not allow Flash onto its iOS-powered devices, including the iPhone and iPad.
Jobs also revealed that Flash is the number one reason for crashes on the Mac platform. For its part, Adobe fired back and said that any crashes of Flash in Mac OS X are not related to its software, but are instead the fault of Apple's operating system.
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97 Comments
"...we've proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform," he said.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, in the context of having access to hardware acceleration or otherwise.
Wait, I thought that Flash was supposed to be a "web standard"? Why would they need a special version for the MBA?
Optimizing Flash for MacBook AIR?
Are you serious?
If this doesn't tell you that Adobe is a fucking joke I don't know what does.
Narayen totally misses the point that he needs to develop a Mac-friendly version of Flash, not an MBA-specific version of Flash.
Public opinion against Flash has become a groundswell; what he's really trying to do here is stem the bleeding. Nothing he says can be trusted, so I wouldn't put too much faith in this little Engadget puff piece.
It's nice that Adobe has decided to respond with its engineering instead of its PR department.
One helps its customers, the other its ego.