Not So Flash - Adobe Responds to Purported Flash Player Issues

Adobe has responded to purported memory leak problems its popular Flash Media Player is having while displaying video content on the web. Emmy Huang, a product manager for Adobe Flash Player, said in a blog post yesterday that her team doesn't "know of a specific memory leak in Flash Player" but is "looking into it."

Rumors of an apparent "memory leak" in Adobe Flash Player have been making the rounds on Twitter and in Internet forums in recent months but the issue received larger attention a week ago when New York Times tech guru David Pogue wrote about it in his blog in a post entitled: "Why Do Adobe Flash Videos Slow Down?"

"I was watching some videos online, and cursing the way they seem to get slower and jerkier the longer you watch them," Pogue writes in the post. "Eventually, it gets so bad that it’s no longer a video. It’s a slideshow. One frame every four seconds. And then you have to restart the computer."

If you're a photographer who either posts videos on your own website or tries to view videos on other photo sites, you may have noticed the issue too. Adobe Flash Player operates as a plug-in for most Internet browsers to help display video. Though there are competitors to Flash -- including Microsoft's Silverlight application (which is used to stream movies on Netflix) -- Adobe's player remains, by far, the most popular video plug-in out there.

According to Pogue, he had a phone conversation with a product manager for Adobe who confirmed that the Flash player is experiencing a problem.

"We do have some memory leak issues, and we’re working on some solutions,” the product manager, who was not named in Pogue's article, stated.

Huang, in her post, says she wasn't on the call with Pogue so can't determine what issues he was specifically experiencing.

"I do know that although a memory leak is a possibility we couldn't say we knew for certain until we were able to reproduce the issue and make that determination," she writes. "If we can reproduce the problem in house, we are better able to diagnose the issue and create a fix."

If users are experiencing problems with Flash, she recommends that they visit Adobe's dedicated Flash community forums here. She also recommends searching Adobe's public "bugbase" located here.