Adobe Flash - or why Adobe obviously hates it's customers

Ok so the title is a little over the top, I'll admit, but  lets be honest: Adobe hates you because Flash continues to suck.  There's a whole host of reasons, from it chewing up your CPU because it can, to exhausting your memory to offering the universe a million *NEW AND IMPROVED* ways to hack your computer.  However ignoring all of that, Adobe is right Flash can quite literally be equated to being the web.  Without Flash the web is a pretty desolate place: no youtube, no streaming video, many streaming audio sites won't work (I'm looking at you CBC! Do you know how much work I had to do to find your icecast streams again?!?!), it's quite a mess.

And while I think that Apple making a stand against Flash is a good thing, open standards are always better, more long term and overall better for everyone, Apple is wrong for blocking it coming to it's devices, in particular the iPad, it's a bloody internet tablet that's been done over and over again, Apple just has the right brand of magic smoke that people are inhaling to think this is both new and revolutionary and they should buy it now, if not sooner.  But I digress from what I really want to complain about.

What I really want to complain about, is the fact that while Adobe thinks of itself *AS* the web, you would expect it to actually keep up with technology and be quite supportive of everything, right?  WRONG - there was recently quite a spat of exploits in Flash 10.0.xx (and everything before I think) that meant that hacking your box was as easy as sneezing.  Flash basically provided a way to run arbitrary code on your computer, as the user your logged in as (meaning if your on Windows and running as root / Administrator it had full access to your machine, if your on a sensible OS that has strong user protections like *NIX or Mac it meant it could trash your data, but not much more).  Fine, dandy release an update and we can all move on with our lives... Well they did, except in doing so they ELIMINATED support for 64-bit flash, which even though it was "alpha / beta / test / don't use this" has been way easier to deal with and rock solid for me under Linux.

They claim it will come back, but honestly this is like telling everyone who was having a good time actually proving their product didn't suck that they don't care about them.  We've had 64-bit x86 cpu's for something like a decade now, we've had good support for 64-bit code on Linux for nearly that long, and we've had good browser support for 64-bit for at least the last 5 years (mainly because I've been running 64-bit browsers and been quite happy with it, thank you very much) so why can't Adobe figure out how to build a 64-bit version of flash and properly support it?

Because Adobe hates it's customers, plain and simple.

Pardon me, while I go figure out how to wrap flash in a haze of indirect wrappers just to make it work, and so I'm not vulnerable to the internet and can go back to watching my youtubes.