Adobe’s website for Air (their cross-platform ‘web for the desktop’ technology) requires Flash 10. If you have an earlier version of Flash, like 75% of the visitors to my website, then you see a big blank box.
This is a terrible mistake for the company that makes Flash. In no way does it inspire confidence that Flash is accessible.
The real irony is Adobe’s own website was the first website I’ve seen that was incompatible with the version of Flash I was using. If other websites leveraged Flash 10, they gracefully degraded so that I could use them with Flash 9.
When I finally upgraded, I couldn’t see why Adobe’s website needed Flash 10 was required. I wasn’t wowed. All I saw was some fancy transitions between slow-loading flash videos.
Just by being open, that one website used 125% of my CPU even when I wasn’t interacting with it. No joke, 125% is what OS X reported. I am using a dual core machine, so the 125% means that 100% of one CPU, and 25% of another were used — just to render a webpage I wasn’t even looking at.
Is Adobe fine with alienating 75% of the internet?
Why can’t they make their own website laptop friendly?
Why should I trust their new Air platform that “lets developers use proven web technologies” if its own website won’t just work for me?