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Man, I am so tired of this meme going around. Have you ever quantitatively compared Flash's performance to HTML? Because others have, and they found Flash to be twice as fast . Have you ever quantitatively measured Flash's impact on battery life? Because it turns out battery life is almost exactly the same as equivalent HTML content (despite running 2x-4x faster in many cases). And do you have statistics on how often Flash crashes on mobile devices, compared to other apps? In my experience at least, Safari on my iPad crashes more often than Flash on my Android devices (which has never crashed to my knowledge).

crashed on my phone or used lots of CPU and killed my battery

Fwiw, that only hard data I've ever seen totally contradicts what you're saying. In performance tests, Flash runs 2x as fast as equivalent "HTML5" content, so it's actually more CPU efficient. This means it's probably more battery-efficient too. Another test shows an older, less optimized version of Flash running up to 4x faster but only using 10% more battery than HTML.

I can't find any statistics on crashing, but anecdotally... for a year I've owned three mobile devices that run Flash, and it has never crashed on any of them. Not once. Meanwhile I also have an iPad, and Safari crashes on it once every several weeks. Safari doesn't need Adobe's help to be crashy :-)

This seems to be "so, sluggish" to you?

This article is more suited to the slashdot crowd: http://www.craftymind.com/2011/01/06/mac-app-store-hacked-how-developers-can-better-protect-themselves/

Developers need to change their validation routine to better check that the receipt really belongs to them. http://www.craftymind.com/2011/01/06/mac-app-store-hacked-how-developers-can-better-protect-themselves/

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark2/

Note: He hasn't tried testing the new FP10 text rendering engine, I'm interested to see what performance increases it has made. In several cases my own benchmark scores (with FF) are much higher with flash, but I see no improvement on the HTML5 side. Flash is more than a video plug-in, and for most of what it does HTML5's Canvas performance still lags far behind.

think again

His experience in that video above was it didn't work - because the video he tried to view was Theora/OGG - which the iPad/iPhone don't support.

Having tried that demo in Safari, the reason it didn't work on the iPad was... uh...

Well, I have an idea. Based on my own HTML5 tests on my iPhone, the <video> element isn't actually implemented in the browser, instead you get a little "play" button which you can press to open the video in - well, a separate video player. Kind of like how videos work in the YouTube app, you get a video window which you can touch to display controls, including a "done" button to exit the video and go back to where you were. (Although my test page is using JavaScript to embed the video, so that might screw things up.)

I have no idea if this is how it works on the iPad, but if it works the same way, that would explain why it didn't work - because HTML 5 video isn't played embedded in the page, but in the "video" app. Kind of.

What's the difference between an HTML5 video tag and a simple hyperlink to a video file, which has worked for as long as video files have been around?

The fact that it's played within the page, and is part of the DOM, which means that you can do all sorts of stuff with the video which you can't with plugins. You can manipulate the video in all sorts of crazy ways.

The HTML5 video tag requires your browser to be a video player too, instead of just handing off the video to your systems video player. This increases bloat.

Oh no! "The IMG tag requires your browser to be an image viewer too, instead of just handing off the video to your systems image viewer! This increases bloat!"

Don't forget the fact Adobe didn't have an intel version of Photoshop ready until well after the platform switch, basically giving Jobs the finger during a critical transition back when they were holding all the cards.

For that matter, it's not like they have a real copy of Flash for any phone yet, let alone the iPhone. Even if Apple hadn't had prevented it, there's no real garantee it would be anything but vaporware yet.

This is a point everybody seems to miss: Adobe don't even have a released version of Flash for Android yet (it's supposedly coming in the second half of this year) nor for Windows Mobile 6.5 or 7. The hottest tech market in years and Adobe botched it badly. The truth is they didn't give a shit about Flash for mobile devices until Apple made them hot again and they didn't have the code to push out there and capitalize on the current controversy and so they have been reduced to whining and begging through the media.

With (Apple-backed) HTML5 now doing all kinds of cool shit Flash's days are numbered anyway (and about time too).

Get a Macintosh.

I have a MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB of RAM. It's 2 years old, and doesn't support GPU help decoding video (it's a GeForce 8600M GT). Someone at my work was questioning why I think Flash is so evil, today I was able to show them. I watched three videos today. Let's compare the experiences.

1. Video one was an MPEG-4 720p trailer for Super Mario Galaxy 2, played in QuickTime Player. When it ran, both of my cores were at 15-20% usage, playback was perfectly smooth.
2. Video two was an MPEG-4 video played through an HTML5 demo (first demo on this page). According to the article, the video is played onto an HTML Canvas, which is then used to draw on another canvas which is displayed. This video, while smaller, took about 10% of one core and 40-50% of another on Safari, with little hit clicking on the video having it explode. The playback was nice and smooth.
3. Video three was an old video on YouTube. It wasn't very big (maybe 360px high), and used 75-80% of both cores. Playing this causes my laptop to heat up and fans to kick on. It's pathetic.

Now not all YouTube videos are that bad, for some reason that particular video was just really bad. Many small videos like that will only use 30-50% of both cores. Even smaller videos will have occasional hiccups where it will drop 2 frames. 480p videos will usually use up a good chunk of my CPU (~80%), and 720p videos can drop frames when a lot changes in the scene (like a pan). If I change from Flash to HTML5 video (MPEG4), 720p stuff plays back no problem. OK Go's recent video of a Rube Goldberg machine? My Mac can't play it reliably in Flash at 480p without dropping frames when a lot of action is going on.

It's not just videos, although that's where I usually run into it. Flash sites with animation just suck down CPU, little games can really heat up my Mac. I think the problem is the way Flash displays things, but that's just a hunch.

If you know anyone with a Mac (the older the better), go play around with Flash content. It's almost impressive how poorly it performs. Faster and faster Macs help cover it up, but that's no excuse. I'm pretty sure that I could have played Flash content through Parallels at the same or lower CPU usage, but I don't have Parallels installed anymore to test with.

If Adobe spent any time optimizing Flash on OS X, people wouldn't hate it nearly as much. Apple would still hate it (Steve likes control), but people wouldn't have the "kill it now" attitude.

"Flash has its strengths, but not when it comes to creating insanely great mobile experiences" Nothing really creates insanely great mobile experiences, mobile is far more about functionality then experience because it is such a limiting platform. Most of our clients looking for iphone apps are trying to scale down the full experience to a limited set of core functionality that supports a sometimes connected, highly relevant, supplement to the richer web desktop/laptop experiences. As much as people want to say that HTML5 richness can keep up with Flash, I've already tried to start some benchmarks to see where the performance gaps are. http://craftymind.com/factory/guimark2/HTML5ChartingTest.html http://craftymind.com/factory/guimark2/FlashChartingTest.html To give some perspective, the iphone renders the HTML5 test at about 0.5 fps.

"Flash has its strengths, but not when it comes to creating insanely great mobile experiences" Nothing really creates insanely great mobile experiences, mobile is far more about functionality then experience because it is such a limiting platform. Most of our clients looking for iphone apps are trying to scale down the full experience to a limited set of core functionality that supports a sometimes connected, highly relevant, supplement to the richer web desktop/laptop experiences. As much as people want to say that HTML5 richness can keep up with Flash, I've already tried to start some benchmarks to see where the performance gaps are. http://craftymind.com/factory/guimark2/HTML5ChartingTest.html http://craftymind.com/factory/guimark2/FlashChartingTest.html To give some perspective, the iphone renders the HTML5 test at about 0.5 fps.

downloadPatches.sh - shell script that extracts the torrent files from all Blizzard Downloader clients in the current directory
extorrents - Perl script that extracts the torrent files from all Blizzard Downloader clients in the current directory
biz-extorrents.py - Python script to extract torrent files from all Blizzard Downloader clients in the current directory
web app extractor - Web app to extract torrent files out of any Blizzard Downloader EXE linked online

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