Shocker! Adobe Flash Player Has Serious Issues Under OS X Lion

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flash_security

Wondering why your laptop’s battery life has dropped and its CPU temperature has gone through the roof now that you’ve installed OS X Lion, especially when watching YouTube videos or browsing Flash-heavy sites?

Surprise, surprise: Adobe Flash is having more problems post-Lion, as Apple’s favorite punching bag has sheepishly admitted that there seems to be an issue with Flash Player under OS X 10.7.

According to a knowledge base article posted on their website:

 Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration. Custom native mouse cursors are not animating properly on Mac 10.7. The Flash Player settings dialog does not respond to mouse clicks. If you find yourself in this state, you can use the “tab” key to change the focus to the “Close” button and use the spacebar to close the dialog.  While not all settings are available, you can also use the Flash Player
native control panel located in System Preferences.

Note the use of the word “possibly” related to disabled hardware acceleration. In other words, Adobe doesn’t know… it could just as well be their own crummy programming.

Honestly, I think half the problem for Adobe isn’t that Flash Player sucks, though it does, or that it totally isn’t necessary to install anymore, which it isn’t. It’s the fact that since Apple directed so much public scrutiny on Flash as a product, Adobe keeps on failing over and over again, which just ends up affirming in most people’s minds what Steve Jobs has already said.

Get your act together, Adobe. You’ve had months to test Flash Player under Lion. Even if this is Apple’s fault, you could have been telling people about this problem weeks ago, under the Gold Master. Now Flash just looks terrible… again.

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