Adobe Air does not support gzip compressed HTTP responses from web servers, nor does Adobe Air support HTTP 1.1 persistent connections. So if you build an app using Adobe Air you can expect it to only accept large chunks of uncompressed data and you can expect it to establish a new connection any time it needs to talk to a server. That's gonna make any Adobe Air super slow. Why would Adobe's flagship technology platform not support basic internet functionality? And why would they release an application development platform that isn't engineered for responsiveness and performance? Adobe Air is now years old and these issues don't ever seem likely to be addressed. Who knows - seems Steve Jobs may be right.