A lot of hay was made that Apple’s new iPad doesn’t support Adobe Flash in its web browser. Steve Jobs commented off-hand that the reason for the lack of support was all the bugs in Flash. I think he’s on to something.

Specifically, Jobs mentioned that most of the time a Macintosh crashes, it’s because of Adobe software.

I can vouch for that.

There are web sites I avoid, websites that use Flash heavily. Visiting those websites on my Macintosh (using Safari as the web browser) inevitably results in the program crashing. It’s as predictable as broken promises from politicians.

It gets worse.

According to an article in ComputerWorld, infected PDF files are responsible for a lot of the digital mischief out there on the Internet. From the article:

In the first quarter of 2009, malicious PDF files made up 56% of all exploits tracked by ScanSafe. That figure climbed above 60% in the second quarter, over 70% in the third and finished at 80% in the fourth quarter.

Yikes!

I’ve written about my disdain for Flash before. Still, I remain a happy Adobe customer: I use their creative suite on my Macintosh for a lot of the work I do. I use Photoshop and Illustrator to create figures for my books, and I use Dreamweaver to create web pages — including Wambooli.

Adobe is not an evil company. They own a niche and they have loyal fans. Hopefully Jobs refusal to put Flash on the iPad will carry some weight, and Adobe can work on getting the bugs out of Flash and work on the security issues surrounding PDF files.