Has Google Gone Quixote in the Fight to Save Adobe Flash?

March 31, 2010 - By Justin E. Gehrke

The past few months have not been kind to Adobe Flash. For that matter, the past few years haven’t been much better. It was excluded from the initial, 2007 release and each subsequent update of the Apple iPhone. It hurt, but it was acceptable. After all, it was a phone…a smartphone…but a phone all the same.

The exclusion of the reigning king of streaming video, from the Apple iPad, though? That was too personal. It’s a computer. Computers have Flash. If they don’t, users can’t watch Hulu. If you can’t watch Hulu, what is the point of. recreational computing?

Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, went as far as to call Flash a “hog.” He may have been specifically referring to its overuse of system resources, but, be honest, is there ever a good connotation when you’re compared to swine?

That was February 2010. Fast forward to today, March 31, 2010, which is light years in computing time. Adobe’s prodigal son (or daughter) is still being ignored by Apple. Today, though, in a move that would have made Don Quixote proud, Google stepped in to defend and save Adobe from…well, itself. Actually, defend might not be the correct term, since Google was pretty frank about Adobe’s shortcomings. Google has confirmed, though, that it is officially involved with Adobe, in hopes of charting a future course for Flash that ensures its survival.

Like it or not, one has to concede that the Flash plug-in is one of the most used browser plug-ins in the computing world. It powers more streaming content than we would really like to admit. Its fame is equaled only by its infamy. Why? The coding insecurities inevitably discovered have led to more zero-day vulnerabilities than computer security professionals would like to recall. Additionally, Adobe’s easy going, quarterly patching schedule has done little to help. On top of it all, Flash can be a bit resource intensive, especially when it shows its true plug-in colors and locks up your browser.

Google aims to be part of the solution to Adobe’s problems. By examining Flash’s successes and failures, Google is confident a new API can be developed that fixes what is broken and ensures the plug-in can play nicely with the Google Chrome OS, the Chrome browser, and, ultimately, even third-party browsers. In an official Google blog post, spokesperson Linus Upson addressed the overall problem with browser plug-ins by saying they “…can lead to incompatibilities, reduction in performance and some security headaches. [So], today we’re making available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. We plan to bring this functionality to all Chrome users as quickly as we can.”

In addition to just fixing how it works, Google also plans to fix how Flash is delivered. Future Chrome downloads will include Flash as an integrated plug-in. This will not only save users an additional download but also ensure users will have the most up-to-date software, which in turn increases their level of computer security. Google plans to take security a step further by restricting webpages with Flash content to Chrome’s sandbox, which will, in turn, minimize the extent to which Adobe vulnerabilities can be exploited by hackers.

Whether or not Google’s involvement is enough to save Adobe Flash remains to be seen. There is the obvious debate regarding the development of HTML-5, which may or may not be a less resource-intensive and a more secure alternative to Flash. For now, though, it seems Google has a new pet project, and, as a result, Adobe Flash may have a new lease on life.

A Note to Steve Jobs: You don’t like Flash because it hogs your resources. We don’t like Flash either because of its propensity to cause browser seizures and lousy security, but we do like the internet…which is full of Flash. Everyone who buys an iPhone or iPad owns it, so they should decide how its resources are used. So, for the love of…well, you…please take a cue from Google and help Adobe make Flash work on your products. Don’t worry. When we’re done watching this week’s episodes of The Office and 60 Rock on Hulu, we’ll get right on the problem of making Flash less swine-like. That is all. Thank you.