Lately I have been doing a lot of Flex and Flash development. This has led me to discover, through issues with my projects, two major BUGS in flash player 9.0.124 (Current version). With the recent release of FlashPlayer 10 beta, I was expecting these bugs to have been addressed. Unfortunatly not.
Through sheer frustration I would to point out these bugs to the general community as one in particular is very serious. It is a major show stopper in my opinion. A bug that threatens the viability of Flash/Flex/AIR with actionscript 3. (Actionscript 2 does not have this problem) And the bug is a very simple and common one.
MASSIVE MEMORY LEAKS. See Adobe bug tracker FP-49
I am surprised this has not gotten more attention. Firefox, for example, has been slamed on memory problems in FireFox2. This memory leak could be a major cause of browser slow down and memory usage issues.
In simple terms, this bug does not free up memory properly. For example, you may have a rich internet ad in flash on your web page. It may be running over and over, and if using the latest Actionscript3 (I would, its 10 times faster then AS2) the ad could be slowly growing in memory usage.
I commonly leave tabs open for days like many other people I imagine. Imagine what this bug is doing to the broswer.
This issue also makes Adobe AIR unsuitable for many applications. Writting an application that runs as a desktop application and lives in the task bar for days at a time is simply not very viable with this bug hanging over you.
If you are a developer, I urge you to have a read of FP-49 and vote for it. (Adobe lets flash/flex developers vote for bugs to fix first. The more votes, the faster it gets addressed.
Secondly I would like to mention bug “Security.loadPolicyFile() attempts to load file only once” FP-67
This bug basically makes flash used with socket communications near unusable. All my development depends on it. So if you can, please kick that one along too. 
3 responses so far ↓
1 Kyle Simpson // Jun 26, 2008 at 8:52 am
I agree that these are troubling bugs that Adobe needs to address. But just because they still exist does not mean that throwing Flash out is the best course of action. I think we need to be more proactive in our voicing of and petitioning of Adobe to address these issues. The more the community rallies around their project and productively urges it’s betterment, the better the result will be.
Adobe has committed to making the SWF more open-source, and so in that spirit, I think we should embrace it like we would any open-source project, knowing it’s full of holes but also being willing to role up our sleeves and help plug them, or in this case, at least hand the putty over to Adobe and show them where to plug it.
2 Kyle Simpson // Jun 26, 2008 at 8:53 am
Oh, and btw, the second issue you mention, it’s actually issue #67 here: https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-67
3 JamieG // Jun 26, 2008 at 9:21 am
Thanks Kyle,
I completely agree with you.
This is why I posted this blog as to try and generate some pressure on Adobe by getting users to get onto the bug trackers an voice there concerns by voting. And it looks like you have as you have listed a Bug tracker URL.
Still, on this topic of late. I have been using OS X a lot of late. and am very disappointed that Flash for OSX is pretty much a dog performance wise. Same SWF can eat up twice as much CPU on a Mac then a PC. This is a very important issue considering the up swing in Mac/OSX (For good reason.)
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