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."

Comments

Adobe Flash will die

[xororand]

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.

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[Dachannien]

What happens to open source browsers like FF who can't pay for the patents and licenses?

Maybe HTML5 in Firefox should mean that I can right click and "save as". Then it won't really matter.

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[MichaelSmith]

Agreed that Flash needs to be replaced, but not with HTML 5.

What about all the browser applications written in flash? Will we just not have them?

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[Homburg]

What patents and licenses? From the W3C's patent policy:

The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.

Of course, anything hypothetically could be patented; but HTML5 is at least in the position that there are no known patent restrictions on implementing it.

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[sopssa]

If anything, HTML5 is actually the cause that might allow pushing Linux and Firefox even further away.

Basically the situation is currently this;

Microsoft: H.264 for IE (and they are already licensing it in Windows 7). Will not support Theora.
Apple: H.264 for all OS X, iPhone and iPad. Will not support Theora.
Google: H.264 for Chrome (but not for the open source version!). May roll out their own video codec, to mix things even a little bit more.
Mozilla: Theora for Firefox. There is no way they can use H.264 because of countless amount of open source forks. Could only possible support it in main binary Firefox, other users left without.
Opera: Theora. Could support H.264, but wants Theora more.

Develop a plugin that plays H.264 video inside browser to circumvent that Firefox situation? Flash already does exactly that.

Either HTML5 Video will seriously fail and Flash will continue dominating, or the big players will use it to push Firefox and other open source browsers and Linux off the market.

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[russotto]

So basically you are implying that free and open source itself isn't a sustainable model? That to get full use of it, people should lower to piracy?

Do you really expect to win a rigged game by playing by the rules?

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[jedidiah]

There's no reason the plugin experience can't be "seamless". This is just mindless fear mongering.

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[node 3]

If firefox can be pointed to youtube and videos don't play

That already happens. Mozilla doesn't use the IE Flash plugin, you have to install it yourself.

and there is no obvious solution to make them play

There's no reason, other than political, that Firefox can't show a missing plug-in icon, just like with Flash, that redirects to an h.264 plugin.

Re:Adobe Flash will die

[shutdown -p now]

Yeah, but Mozilla accepted it for Fennec only. They don't want it in desktop builds, because it'd let you use the "evil" H.264.

One big fat reason that gets missed...

[Penguinisto]

...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...)

Re:Jobs once called Adobe lazy and he may be right

[BikeHelmet]

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.

Re:ActionScript vs. JavaScript

[chill]

If you want an example, just look at ActiveX and IE6. I expect Flash to take the same route. A long, lingering, painful death.

Its the video codec, not the delivery system...

[itsdapead]

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.

Flash solved "can everyone watch my video?"

[naz404]

Regarding the HTML5 vs Flash video debacle, Radley Marx says it best on his blog post "Five Myths of HTML5 (vs. Adobe Flash)":

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".

Re:Flash solved "can everyone watch my video?"

[naz404]

I read somewhere that Google isn't not going to use Ogg Theora on YouYube because it isn't as efficient as H.264 and would eat up too much storage space on their datacenters. A user comment at Mozillazine blog post "Video, Freedom And Mozilla" gives a few good points:

TK: I think that the fact that Google only enabled h.264 HTML5 video on youtube has more to do with the fact that all their videos were already encoded in that format (at 3 different resolutions), for iPhone and Android support. Therefore, it was relatively easy to just turn on the switch for beta HTML5 embedding.

Transcoding all those videos to Ogg Theora (with multiple copies for SD, HQ and HD) would require a major computing effort and storage space availability, that, sadly, just isnt worth it at this point. Remember, it took MONTHS in 2007 for youtube to transcode all of their h.263 FLV videos to h.264 mp4's for iPhone support. And that was before Youtube added 720p and 1080p HD video support. They'd literally have to double their datacenters' storage space!!

Re:Jobs once called Adobe lazy and he may be right

[Pius II.]

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.

Re:All about money.

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:ActionScript vs. JavaScript

[AmberBlackCat]

My first thought was Flash is the reason for the death of ActiveX...

It did, they have

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Flash gfx rendering abt 2 be faster on Mac than

[Mr. Arbusto]

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.