Flash In The Cage

When in full screen, the Flash runtime simply won’t pass keyboard events to your code. When I first discovered this, I asked myself “why?” as it makes no sense to disable text entry simply because you are in full screen mode. I recently had a chance to ask some Adobe people why this freakin weird behaviour exists, I was told that Adobe views this as a security liability and that they are worried someone may use text entry in full screen mode for evil. They went on to say that users could be fooled into thinking a fullscreen Flash app could simulate an OS and somehow do something bad. I have no idea what. Last I checked Flash doesn’t let you access a file system or registry and OS’s don’t ask for credit card information, or personal information… actually, websites that don’t run in full screen mode do. And guess what, desktops have been running full screen apps that accept keyboard input since, well, the concept of a desktop has been around! Oddly, its not a Vista security flaw to run apps – such as games – in full screen mode and allow text input.

After a bit of back and forth with the Adobe guys, they simply said Flash is “very restrictive” and that Adobe obviously doesn’t want Flash to become a liability cause it would loose a lot of luster and possibly market share (oddly, it was me who brought up real Flash liabilities).

Though I understand the concern, It bothers me that software companies get overly anal about security. Vista is apparently the most secure Windows OS ever. So secure that it’s unusable and wastes my valuable time. If the concept of “security first, purpose later” is prevailing at Adobe like it has done at Microsoft and other large organizations, you can count me out. ironpython looks promising…

(Adobe, if you are reading, put the the glass of Kool-Aid down allow full screen text input).