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Comment by jafl5272 | Hacker News Reader

> If Adobe crashes on Macs, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system ,” Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen told The Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, that’s it. Program crashes. Must be the OS. Right.... Heck, why not blame the hardware, too!

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Not that I agree with him but this article kind of murdered his quote. He was replying to the fact that Jobs had implied that Flash was responsible for the majority of Mac crashes.

I think jobs just meant that Flash simply crashed a lot on Macs but he seemed to infer that Flash actually caused the OS to crash. If Flash is causing the OS to crash then yes there is a problem as you'd hope a program residing in the user space wouldn't crash the kernel.

I think when they say "crash" they mean crashing Safari, not crashing OSX.

That stat came from Apple's automated crash reporting tool, and I can't imagine that'd work after a kernel panic.

OS X saves a log and sends (or asks to send) the report back to Apple the next time the user logs in.

A program in user space cannot be the root cause for a kernel panic. He meant Safari.

I was simply referring to OS X's automated crash reporting tool. Which does work after a kernel panic, regardless of what messed up badly enough to cause such an event.

Cool, thanks for the info.

Jobs didn't imply that Flash is responsible for the majority of crashes. What he did say explicitly, and not for the first time, is that Flash is the number one source of crashes on Macs. That's not the kind of claim a chief executive would make without the data to back it up.

Regardless of whether the crashes are due to poor code in OS X or poor code in Flash, if Apple wants to maintain a reputation for stability, their biggest enemy is the crashes involving Flash. Since they don't control the quality of code in Flash, they've got reason enough to try to kill Flash without their mobile strategy coming into the picture.

Yeah that quote is especially hilarious since Flash crashes more frequently on Linux than OS X. Is that the operating system's fault too?

I have seen Flash crash a few times on Windows too...

Appropriately, this page has a Flash ad that times out and causes the page to become unresponsive on my Mac.

http://marcusvorwaller.com/look/flash_fail-20100430-125225.j...

Flash may have killed Safari but OSX keeps working as if nothing happened. That alone should say something about the OS.

I've seen flash take out Windows XP. Not a blue screen but destabilized the system so badly it needed to be rebooted and it promptly froze halfway through the shutdown process. I'm still curious how flash was able to do that because I could repeat it by visiting the same website.

> Flash may have killed Safari but OSX keeps working as if nothing happened. That alone should say something about the OS.

Sure does: Keep the UI out of the kernel :)

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