The latest version of Flash keeps crashing on me in Google Chrome in many different web pages. Why? I have no idea. Surely Adobe has had many years to stabilize it.

Lots of the pop-up dialogs I'm getting ("The following plug-in is unresponsive: Shockwave Flash" "Would you like to stop it?") about it dying are for advertisements running on some page I'm reading. So it isn't like Flash is doing me any favors being there. Crashing for ads.

Occasionally I want to watch some video that is in Flash. So I need Flash for that. For Firefox at least there's the Flashblock plug-in that'll block flash until you want it to run. So you can avoid the crashes by avoiding Flash except when you need it.

Granted, Steve Jobs wants developers to write apps that only run on Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Sure, he's just trying to maximize his profits. But here's the thing: He's right about Flash. It really is a browser-destabilizing pain in the ass. It is more than annoying. If you have lots of web pages open then all those Flash instances are all eating CPU time. Plus, they can all just start crashing. Jobs has users who just want stuff to work. They do not have a techie's tolerance of flakey software that is cool. Less techie people get flummoxed by things that do not work. Failures throw them for a loop. They do not feel one with their device. They want their device to be totally trusthworthy. Running Flash is way less than totally trustworthy.

Flash was invented in the late 1990s. Here we are in 2010 and it is crashing on me on different versions of Windows and different browsers (I run about 3 different Windows versions and 3 browsers with many tabs open at times). The stuff should just work by now. Adobe has a big income stream and lots of developers. Their crap should just work and work extremely reliably. But it doesn't. Oh, and it shouldn't be a CPU sucker.

Bottom line: I want HTML 5 and better browsers to crush Flash with some help from Steve Jobs. Adobe has had enough time to make it work reliably. They've failed.

Update: I've just installed FlashBlock for Google Chrome. Will report back on whether it works well.