--- Trevor Cordes wrote:

And why is it that Adobe can't program worth beans? Their stuff has become the #1 vector for malware. Their record exceeds that of even Mighty Malware Magnet Microsoft!

Microsoft actually put a pop-up blocker into IE at one point. The point was to block pop-up ads. So Adobe wrote Flash to bypass that. Flash has been written specifically to bypass all Microsoft efforts at web security and anti-spying. They designed it to have features like video streaming that would attract web users, but the main purpose was to get past any and all ad blockers. We could get into a discussion of third party ad blockers, but Adobe did bypass all Microsoft efforts. I suspect that's one reason Microsoft stopped: advertisers were using Adobe's product instead, and computer users didn't seem to care, so they catered to advertisers instead. Computer users are their core customers, but they calculated they would get more revenue by catering to advertisers.

The malware guys love it because Flash is specifically written to bypass security. It's already a trojen carrying ads, so piggy-backing malware is trivial.

The real question is how can you provide those services that Flash provides, without using Flash. Make Flash as obsolete as IE6. I suppose Microsoft tried to do that with Silverlight, but really? How about using core features of modern browsers, without the need for Flash at all? Who here is willing to take that on?

Rob Dyck