by Don Burnett
EDIT: Please note some people will see this as me attacking Flash, if you read through it with an open mind you will notice that I am not. I use Flash myself and like the plug-in. I just want to know if there really is truly a reliability issue here and trying prompt to see if Adobe will talk about their process for feedback and how they work to address issues with customers.
Don't think of this as an "Attack" believe me, if I were I'd have more juicy things to say.
-Don
Original Posting:
Over at ZDNET, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a great story that exposes some issues with Flash Player. Before a ton of Adobe Evangelists jump my blog here, let me say I am not attacking Flash here, I want Adobe to address these reliability issues. With a product as important as Flash Player is and the number of machines out there running it (some say it's about 98%) this could be an important issue and if Flash is crashing as much as we think it might be, that could account for a lot of problems people don't really see or know about.
Adrian does a blog for ZDNET, and his most recent discourse is about looking at 3 months worth of reliability data gathered by Vista x64's Reliability monitor. One of the problems it exposed was Flash kept crashing his machine or at least his browser. I have to say this wasn't a shock with me, I have Flash installed myself because it has happened with me to on a regular basis. This is not the only community that I keep up with. I own a Mac Mini computer, and the other day I was reading on another ZDNET blog, one of the Mac ones that the OSX version of Flash has the same sort of problems. This was something that I noted during a posting on whether Flash should come to the iPhone or not. The Blog writer and readers started tag-teaming against Adobe because they felt Flash crashed to much. The reader reply (an IT guy) stated that he wasn't recommending Flash be installed on the OSX machines that he administrated because of reliability issues and crashes.
I admit I don't do a lot with Flash these days except view content, but considering the fact that I am hearing so much in the way of community backlash about this, it would seem like Adobe with all it's great resources, should be working harder to identify these problems. Someone was talking with me the other day about this at a Mac user group and of course he was exaggerating, but he asked the question that "boy wouldn't it be funny if we found out 1/3 to a half of all the computer crashes over the Internet were from Faulty Flash Player installs ? ".
I really hope that's not the case but I wonder if Adobe has a reporting customer feedback mechanism in the Flash player that identifies this stuff and brings it back to them. I also wonder if they are doing anything about it.. When CS3 came out Adobe was very anti x64 Windows support, but I hear this happens on other OSes and 32-bit Windows (including XP). I am really wondering what kind of things they do to fix errors and find out about them, etc.
Maybe, someone from Adobe will be nice enough to comment on these issues and the crashing issues (or at least acknowledge it). At least with Microsoft stuff (and other vendors) most now have a "customer improvement program" that tracks reliability and crashing and logs and reports errors back. I'd like to see Flash have this too.. It also could be poorly written Flash content out on the Internet causing this as well (something well beyond Adobe's control).
Of course most people see IE 7 crashed and they don't look further than to blame Microsoft.. It's nice that you can at least with Vista find out these things.. Any insight into this Adobe? Of course you will probably minimize the crashing thing being a problem, but I am keeping a list of these issues when I see someone on the Internet writing about these kinds of problems, so I can revisit this with you folks..
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