An Adobe browser, briefly considered

Internet Explorer dominates the Web browser market, but are that many people so in love with it? Meanwhile, the Flash player dominates its segment because lots of people find it to be a terrific. So might Adobe one day decide that the next logical step is to try its hand at building its own Web browser?

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch speaks at the company's Max conference Monday.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland, CNET News)

Turns out that's not such a crazy idea. Following the completion of Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, the company's brass actually toyed with the idea.

"We looked at making our own browser," said Adobe's chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, in an interview leading up to this week's Adobe Max conference. "We thought about how to advance the capabilities of the Web."

At first blush, that sounds like a fit with the message Adobe attaches to Flash as a technology to foster delivery of "applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience." But the idea ultimately failed to persuade management that it was wise to commit the resources (and in the process pick another fight with Microsoft.) "Our primary interest is to build a great platform upon which others can build great applications," Lynch said. "There are enough browsers in the world."

Too bad. As a user, I'd like even more choice. Even though they don't have more than minor shares of the market, I'm thrilled that Mozilla, Opera, and Google decided to design their own PC Web browsers. Anything to turn up the heat on Microsoft and force it to think more creatively about the Internet browsing metaphor.

For Adobe, the temptation was to create a product that would do a better job of enabling its technologies on client systems. But Lynch said the green light hinged on whether an Adobe browser would win wide enough distribution. As even Google is discovering, that's not an easy goal to achieve.

"It's brave of (Google) to come out with a browser," he said. "I love to see innovation. But will Chrome get 80 or 90 percent reach? I don't see how that's possible."

[andrew.mager]

I think AIR is better than a browser.

[sounddude51]

I rarely use IE. It still is not very stable, or very attractive. I have used Firefox for years now, but their FF3 is a major step backward in smallness and stability. I'm more and more disappointed with it daily. I've recently downloaded both Opera and Chrome. I have been happy using both on some sites that Firefox3 just rips apart. Their lightness and ease to use are major plus points. Who cares is they are stripped down and ugly. They work. And that's all we care about.

[d2globalinc]

If thats what the masses care about then why did vista even sell one copy? 1 word - WOW... ok 2 words.. EYECANDY

[foobar31]

"Meanwhile, the Flash player dominates its segment because lots of people find it to be a terrific."

I'm curious, what do people find it to be a terrific ______?

[Galaxy5]

An Adobe browser?

Pardon my cynicism, but I have the feeling it would end up costing $45.00, you would have to buy a new license when you wanted to put the browser on another computer, and it wouldn't work well with Adobe's other products anyway.

Two years after release, after putting out a day-late, dollar-short version for the Mac, Adobe would kill it.

The "Premier" version of the Adobe browser would only be available with the $1500.00 Adobe Creative Suite; the installer would take three hours to install a new file system and would mount fifteen different volumes during the installation process (without unmounting any of them after the install) and the installer won't let you deselect any components.

That's why I'm glad Adobe didn't bother.

[milowerx]

Haha! You forgot to mention that it'll take 10 minutes to load each time you use it! Not to mention the fact that the entire thing would be Flash ads annoying the crap out of you all the time! (which you couldn't disable) Adobe is so big they don't even know that if you're having a problem with their reader they offer the notes on HOW to fix it in a PDF!
They should be on the Darwin List.

[bcswartz]

It's technically possible to AIR developers to create their own web browsers using AIR: AIR comes with a WebKit-based browser component. Replicating all of the controls and features of a modern web browser would be a challenge, though.

[timothywmurray]

Flash crashes 2 of the 4 computers in my house and is a terrific resource hog. Besides the only real use of flash is as a DRM wrapper. I am surprised to be saying so, but Silverlite is much more reliable and just plain better.

[dwinks]

Microsoft very much needs to continue the trend they started in Server 2008 and make consumer level OS modular, because Vista and XP both rather suck. However, the one thing Microsoft is VERY good at is making exceptionally good development platforms. .Net is awesome as is Silverlight. I would be more than willing to bet that given the choice of viewing a site in Silverlight or Flash, most people would choose silverlight, some right off the bat, but others would end up trying both before choosing.

Number of browser crashes, slowdowns, and etc. caused by flash for me: a metric crapton.
Number caused by Silverlight: 0 to date.

[dwinks]

I would never use an Adobe browser. The very first thing I do on a fresh OS install is to install Firefox and immediately after, Flash Block. I highly doubt Adobe would allow an addon to block flash, just the same way the Chrome sucks because it doesn't have adblock plus, and almost certainly never will.

[d2globalinc]

Flash block makes for a very boring experience on most media sites out there. Silverlight is crap, and once again MS playing catchup to innovation that has passed them by. Google by the way just announced opening up for add-ons and ad-block plus was at the top of the list ;) so its not far off. The first thing we do on ny fresh windows install is to deny installing silverlight and block it from ever asking again in windows update. We don't have silverlight installed onto any of our workstations and we haven't had a complaint yet that a site couldn't be viewed. This is not the same when we tried YEARS ago to do the same w/ flash. I've developed in Flash since version 3 and its great to see it come as far as it has, but I do agree it can be abused by site developers who get a little carried away with the eye-candy and forget to make a site use-able first. I guess one thing to take from the flash vs silverlight thing - if it wasn't for flash there would be no silverlight because we all know Microsoft couldn't have come up with an original idea to make it without seeing flash do it first. Its a trend MS is good at.

[Holly Klug]

They can't make a amd64 (x86_64) version of Flash for Linux, which is most of today's Linux market, and the performance of Flash on Linux just reeks.

[MatthewFabb]

I guess you didn't hear that Adobe just recently released an alpha of the Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

[d2globalinc]

All you guys with flash crashing your browsers, stop using Internet Explorer and the crappy OS called Windows for browsing. I run a state-of-the-art quad core machine and purchased Vista64 for it at first. Performance was horrible. Installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 64, and never looked back. The only issue I had was with Flash because there was no 64bit version, until recently ;) - now after installing Flash 10 64bit beta - I've not had a single flash issue yet, and the 64bit version is much faster than the emulated 32bit ever was in Firefox 3, which even when running 32bit flash was still faster than that IE crap. Thanks to virtualization and modern CPU's the need to have Windows as your main OS is a thing of the past. Install ubuntu, vmware workstation or virtualbox, and keep that windows stuff isolated in a virtual environment. Windows will eventually be reduced to nothing more than an application environment running ontop of a real OS. With web apps, virtualization, and hosted applications, Microsoft's glory days of charging for an OS are going to be a thing of the past sooner rather than later. As for servers, we havn't had a windows OS installed as a primary OS for years. The only way we would run a windows server is to put it in a virtual environment so we could remote into the linux host and reboot the thing when it froze up or slowed to a crawl. We even see performance gains from windows when it doesn't have to manage the hardware anymore. You want modular Windows? Virtualize it, and leave the real tasks to an OS that can really perform with modern hardware. Microsoft trend has been and will continue to be one that gambles on hardware making their crappy software work good enough instead of actually optimizing the next version. Vista should have been 64bit only and perhaps then Microsoft could have focused on one side of the coin and actually made something that worked out of the gate. At least then Vista would have been a success to at-least get 64bit computing to the masses. Instead they pushed 32bit again so they could sell more copies and push upgrades to XP users which in turn would make their stock holders happy. Which of course backfired on them when people came to realize their old machines running XP didn't have the power to run Vista32 because it was bloated with even more crappy software. My current workstation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DWzuIreDGA. Its no secret everyone is always looking for an alternative to Microsoft's products and arrogance - and now there are finally alternatives that can give our clients the freedom they want and still allow them to run their legacy windows applications until new ones become available via the web or through virtualization. Oh and did I mention how much money our clients are saving just by not having to buy antivirus alone? Microsoft... What a racket.. The future looks good ;)