Open Letter to the Jerks at Adobe

Dear Adobe:

First, if you would let me file a bug report without first getting an “Adobe ID”, I would have chosen the quieter route. But you don’t.

While I find it amusing that I periodically get alerts that say, (more or less) “Hey! Guess what? You DON’T need an update!” which is, I admit, a surprising bit of news these days, today I got the message that indeed I needed to update Flash. I take these notices seriously because Flash is notorious for security issues, and I don’t want a gaping hole torn in my Web security. So I went through the update process.

Now, before I updated I had several browser windows open. Some to reference materials, some to sites I’m building and maintaining, some to communications and tracking tools, and so forth. You get the idea. I’ve come to trust that when I shut down my browser it will remember the previous state when it starts back up, reconstructing my workspace.

Unless, that is, I run the Flash Player installer. In THAT case, after the install my browser relaunches, but instead of my workspace, I get advertising for Adobe. And that’s all I get. Needless to say, when you just cost me a difficult-to-estimate amount of time getting things back the way they were (some tabs open for days or weeks, not practically recoverable from history), that is not the time to be splashing your logo in my face.

So stop doing that. There was a time I was a big fan of Flash, but now I look forward to the day I don’t need it at all. And that day is coming soon.

P.S. You’re a big company that presumably reviews your public-facing copy. Someone over there needs to learn the difference between “setup” and “set up”.

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