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Apple's Change of Heart On Flash
Dotnaught writes "In a blog post, Walter Luh, co-founder of Ansca Mobile and a former employee of both Apple and Adobe, recounts how Apple once promoted Flash on the iPhone then changed its mind because Flash didn't provide the optimal mobile user experience. 'I think that Apple came to the same conclusion I've come to — namely that Flash has its strengths, but not when it comes to creating insanely great mobile experiences,' he writes. Luh's piece ends with a pitch for mobile development using the Corona SDK, a Lua-based programming environment that strives to recapture the simplicity of early versions of Flash."
Adobe Flash will die rather sooner than later and it won't be missed. Now if only all browser vendors could agree on a video codec for HTML5.
There isn't any reason why Flash should require a dual core processor just to barely run on the Mac. I use both Macs and PCs and the performance on the Mac side is horrible. Surely a company as large and as resource rich as adobe could have figured out how to program a flash plugin that is quick and lightweight. Is there something that I'm missing?
Flash can't work very well on a phone because it was designed for computers. Computers have an ever-present pointing device called a mouse that is used to activate many Flash elements. How do you replicate that with a pointer that only exists long enough to click on something?
...security.
Seriously - with all the active exploits out there that use Flash as a way into an operating system, I can very easily see a Flash bug being exploited to bust right through the iPhone's 'walled garden' setup (what with it's default root password and all...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Is there something that I'm missing?
Knowledge of how large companies stagnate. It's all bureaucratic BS.
I'm sure there's a team at Adobe that wants to optimize flash - but they're probably being blocked by the higher ups that refuse to cut backwards compatibility.
Flash performance is horrible on any computer. Youtube used to be smooth on my old 2.2ghz Athlon XP, but now it barely plays. Even my 3.5ghz Athlon II has occasional stutters.
If you want an example, just look at ActiveX and IE6. I expect Flash to take the same route. A long, lingering, painful death.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Agreed that Flash needs to be replaced, but not with HTML 5.
For general "rich internet application" stuff, moving from proprietary Flash to standards-based HTML5 (+DOM/SVG/ECMAScript) should be good news for open source. The problem is not HTML 5 per se but that the only video codec that seems to be gaining widespread support in HTML 5 is the patent-encumbered H.264.
Newer versions of Flash look like shifting H.264 as the codec for video anyway (albeit with different packaging), so Flash vs. HTML5 is a non-issue on the video front.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Gordon - An open-source Flash runtime in JavaScript+SVG
This will happen.
It is quite early, but i can bet this will be the future of Flash.
There are no (huge) changes needed on the website, just some simple instructions to follow and you just future-proofed your website. (that is if Gordon becomes a full runtime in JS. Cross your fingers and toes)
As JS becomes faster and faster each generation of browsers, it becomes a serious platform for development consideration.
This is what i am currently doing with 2 games at the moment, working on 2nd right now actually. This one will be much easier to get done and put up before the first one i started on. (MMO vs single player game(+stats... maybe))
Despite a lot of claims against it, "The Cloud" revolution is happening... again, but this time it is even more kickass and in your face than before.
The problem solved by Flash video wasnt can I show a video? Instead, Flash solved can everyone watch my video? HTML5 video doesnt provide this solution; it just adds another approach to the incompatibility pile.
HTML5 isn't going to change things unless browser vendors agree on a common codec.
Also, unless HTML5's video spec finds a way to implement DRM on video stream playback (which Flash does), studios and major media content providers who want to protect their content aren't going to bite on "HTML5 video".
http://www.object404.com
With all due respect, that's bullshit. VLC decodes Youtube's streams (saved to disk) at 13% CPU. Flash takes 90%. I don't have a graphics chip that could decode H264 in hardware (apart from being programmable thru OpenCL, to which Adobe has all access in the world). Apple not exposing any APIs (to what?) is a red herring. To me this looks like slowness in the Flash interpreter, a shoddy video codec they implemented, and pure lazyness.
Interesting how Hulu (and others) provide free flash videos while the iTunes store provides videos for sale.
Hulu has already stated they're going to start charging in 2010.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
#DeleteChrome
My first thought was Flash is the reason for the death of ActiveX...
Flash solved can everyone watch my video?
That is totally true. And much like Apple solved the "have to have DRM around online music sales" by being the only place to sell music (forcing studios to drop DRM in order to control price), Flash has thankfully gotten us to the point where everyone can watch video, encoded in h.264 (that's what the online flash video is almost all encoded in these days).
Flash made a great scaffolding, but it is time to drop that scaffolding and use a solution that is more performant and truly cross platform - h.264. And why is it more cross-platform? Because more chips that decode it in hardware mean more devices that can play that format than any format that would need a powerful CPU for decoding. The fact is it can simply run on way more platforms.
HTML5 isn't going to change things unless browser vendors agree on a common codec.
They have, it's h.264. That is all major browser vendors but one - Mozilla. While it's nice they are trying to take a stand and I have to admire them for that, the reality is Chrome will take away ALL of Mozilla's userbase in short order unless they go with the flow on this issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
34% seems a bit optimistic.
On my Macbook (late 2006 Core2 - probably the same CPU as that Mac Mini uses), Flash itself uses somewhere around 95% of one core when playing video. Any video. It doesn't actually matter how large the video is (although HD videos are unwatchable), or what clock speed the CPU is running at, the CPU usage is basically constant.
No other media players (VLC, QuickTime), browser plugins (QuickTime, Flip4Mac), or even Safari's HTML5 video support do this. Since the likes of QuickTime perform far better when embedded in a web page than Flash does, that rules out a problem with the plugin interface. Safari's HTML5 video performance rules out the browser's rendering too - HTML5 videos are much more integrated into the page than a plugin, with all the extra rendering complexity that involves, and they're still faster.
It's not just a raw performance problem. They'd have to be doing busy waits, or polling loops, or something else stupid. It wouldn't surprise me if they were measuring performance based on Flash itself, running stand-alone, while the actual problem is in their plugin code.
Complaining that the performance of Flash on Mac OS X is somehow Apple's fault is just crap. I've heard many claims that Flash video is slower on Mac OS X due to lack of h.264 hardware acceleration. Of course, the Windows version only got this very recently, and Flash video ran just fine on Windows before that. QuickTime runs fine without it. Both Safari and Chrome can play h.264 videos just fine without it. Same goes for the complaints about the plugin model. If it really were that bad, why doesn't Silverlight have the same problems? For that matter, which doesn't the plugin (not ActiveX) version on Windows have the same problem - the plugin API is pretty much the same, after all.
Adobe's claims that Flash has no known crashing bugs are a load of crap too. According to Apple's crash reports from Safari, Flash is responsible for the majority of crashes. According to Mozilla's crash report data, Flash is responsible for the majority of crashes in Firefox on Mac OS X.
Anecdotally, Firefox crashes on me two or three times a day. Of those crashes, I've only ever found one that was caused by Firefox itself - all the rest were caused by Flash. I've actually had to switch to Chrome (which, for various reasons, I don't like as much as Firefox) specifically because of Flash crashing so much. Now, I get the sad plugin box two or three times a day. I've never seen the sad tab page, and I've only had Chrome itself crash once. And this is the developer channel version, which is expected to break.
And then there's the bugs. Many Flash widgets, particularly video players, just don't work reliably on a Mac. All too often, I've had video streams that just refuse to play, or which keep stopping to buffer when there's still several minutes of video left in the buffer, or completely break if you attempt to seek... They all work just fine on the Windows version, of course.
That's just the Mac version. The Linux version of Flash is actually far worse. It's even slower than the Mac version, crashes more frequently, has all the same bugs as the Mac version, and then has a whole load of bugs of it's own.
Frankly, anyone who claims that Flash is cross-platform has clearly never actually used Flash on any platform other than Windows.
That's all fine and dandy but all of the Safari crashs I've had in the past 2 years have been flash plug in related.
Secondly, watching a YouTube video at 480p on my 2.5GHz Core2 Duo takes ~35% of the CPU time available. Watching the same video using the HTML5 version, ~3% of the CPU time available. Even if they did drop it down to 16%, that is still a lot to make vertical mobile Hardware/Software vendors cringe at the power consumption.
Flash is cool because it has a large enough install base at this point you can say it is a compatible way to display rich media in a web page that displays on 99% of the computers in the US. I can't think of any other good things about flash, even if they fix the horrible CPU usage.