Things that have happened since Matthew Dempsky reported this crash bug, which Adobe has yet to release a fix for:<p>-Mozilla Firefox 3 had several alpha, beta, RC, and final releases, moving from late version 2 to version 3.6.<p>-Google Chrome was initially released and ported to Mac and Linux<p>-Safari evolved from version 3 to version 4<p>-Apple developed and released a new version of the iPhone, announced the iPad, and released a new version of Mac OS X<p>-Windows 7 was betad, improved and shipped<p>-Apple's market capitalization nearly doubled from 93 billion to 177 billion<p>-The entire global financial crisis came to a head, with multiple banks and other large firms either collapsing, being acquired for their assets alone, or being bailed out by national governments<p>-Barack Obama was elected president, sworn in, and served his entire first year of office<p>-Sarah Palin, then a surprise pick at running mate, made a series of media gaffes, resigned as governor of Alaska, and parlayed her fame into a television deal with Fox News
So, they verified the bug over a year ago and haven't pushed out the fix because it's slated for an as-of-yet unreleased point upgrade?<p>Confidence inspiring.
Adobe is really feeling threatened now, no doubt about it. They are starting to see an eventual Flash-free web as a real possibility.<p>I wonder if Lotus, Borland, CompuServe, and the other mini-monopolies of their day saw it coming, or just blithely rested on their laurels until they were irrelevant. I was in the tech scene back then, but without something like the internet to keep us informed, it was hard to know what those companies were up to.
So in <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358815,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358815,00.asp</a> the Adobe CTO says:<p>"Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs"<p>and here the Flash Product Manager says:<p>"The team is actively reviewing all unresolved crash bugs in JIRA and will reach out to the submitter if we need their help."<p>That gives me a _great_ deal of confidence they're not lying to me...
A company that lets crashing bugs accidentally slip through the cracks like that isn't taking security very seriously yet. That's pretty scary, considering Flash's market share.
I'm probably the only one, but I find this somewhat hope-inspiring. This response by their CTO gives the Flash team permission to go back and fix all of the crashing bugs and improve performance.<p>If Adobe is like most other large companies, I'd bet those same engineers have been stuck in the downward-spiral feature crunch to support more codecs, more language features, more more more. It takes a pretty high-level push -- like this one! -- to reverse that trend.<p>A good analogy is MSFT and the turnaround on security in ~2001/2002.
In related news:<p>The truth about user perception of Flash finally emerges:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/xbA8W.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/xbA8W.png</a>
The way Adobe handled this issue just goes to show how terrible their QA and bug triage processes are.<p>Personally, I've been withholding from using Flash blocking plug-ins because I always thought that it would take away from my experience of most modern web-sites - that is despite Flash being a big pile of crap in terms of full-screen HD video performance on a gaming-grade laptop that plays Far Cry on maxed out settings.<p>I believe my cup of anger just overflowed - I will be installing Flashblock today.<p>And until Adobe learns how to truly test performance of their software on a variety of machines (oh, don't get me started on GPU acceleration problems in Photoshop CS4 when it first came out and perf issues with Flash HD video playback on specific GPUs) as well as how to properly respond to security issues, Flashblock will be kept enabled.
Instead of working within the confines of native OSs Adobe has managed to dupe us into installing essentially an overlay OS with Flash/ActionScript/Air. They have a responsibility to manage it as such.<p>They have the same problems as Java. They develop a complete OS without regard to core OS code and hardware changes. It's irresponsible curating that no one is reporting on.<p>Forget fixing the bug. If we combine our resources and create a Flash killer that plays nice with native OSs, we won't have to care about Adobe's reckless development.
Could someone plase chime in for me on this: Does Flash have a way of directly patching the current level of software like, say, Google Chrome does? Does Flash 10? It really should.<p>Secondly, a high-impact pervasive problem which allows a plug-in to crash the entire platform should not be marked fixed in next release.
allowing plugins to take down the whole plugin environment is clearly a faulty software design. Sure adobe is lazy/incompetent, but the mozilla/safari teams are no better for not isolating plugins better. Back to school id say learn something about reliable software engineering and sandboxing.
Let us not forget their inability to write a flash plugin that doesn't freeze / stutter while playing video in current firefox and safari on a new macbook pro with tons of available ram and cpu. Their ceo is a liar -- if he actually used a macbook pro as his daily machine as he claimed on tech crunch, he'd be screaming at people on his engineering team until they fixed this.