The Apple vs Adobe fight has entered the next level with Apple officially announcing that it won’t ship its future Macbooks with Adobe’s flash installed. While Apple has stopped short of banning Flash altogether from Mac (which would have been ridiculous) it is making things increasingly difficult for Adobe.
Starting with the newly launched Macbook Air, all future Mac users would have to manually download and install Flash from Adobe. Apple and Adobe had their own share of issues which started when Apple did not allow developers to build Flash applications for its iPhone. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has criticized Flash as software riddled with security issues and termed it unsuitable for handhelds because it is a battery hog.
Adobe in turn has called Apple to be overtly restrictive. In a setback for Apple the US regulators asked Apple to reverse its decision to ban developers from building Flash applications.
What’s worse about this decision is that Adobe would henceforth stop issuing updates for Flash on OS X as a part of the Apple Security updates. Instead, Mac users would have to download these updates manually – which again is the first side effect of this cat fights starting to affect consumers.
[Via Reuters]
