Slashdot Mirror
Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away
CWmike writes "While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted, say industry analysts. 'There are many people who despise Flash, but I'm not sure they'd love the alternative right out of the gate. The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,' Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.' Here are six factors that give Flash a strong position over HTML 5 and other alternative Web media technologies in the foreseeable future. For starters, While Android has made Flash a wedge issue, Flash is just beginning to show up on multiple mobile device platforms, Wen writes. Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages, but Craig Barberich, vice president of marketing and business development at Coincident TV, highlights the pervasiveness of Flash on the Web as we know it: 'Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked about is a lot of the interactive elements.'"
Not only is flash going away, but also django, rails, lift.. and all the other web frameworks. Google Native Client already works in chromium and firefox. And in two years, all of that technology will be sucked into a sandboxed binary, running at native speed. What language? any language that has an LLVM backend. "These are exciting times, better get to it"
Two words. "Browser Games" I play Deepolis, a very responsive and media-rich game. Can't imagine it implemented in anything other than Flash. It's the same reason many linux people have dual-boot. Games.
You missed the biggest problem with flash: it is a huge security hole.
Anything that replaces flash, that can be comfortably run outside of a dedicated VM (as is best with flash on ANY platform), has a nice advantage.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
How does jobs control the market space. There are a bunch of People happy with Android phones, I am an iPhone user myself but really I don't see too much major differences somethings Android does better some things the iPhone does better. Android has been getting more market share faster then the iPhone. In general Apple isn't controlling the market at best it is Leading the market as its products are innovative enough to get competitors to imitate and improve on their designs.
Now if Adobe can get Android, RIM and Microsoft to use Flash it will push Apple to the minority. But as of right now Android has Flash as an AddOn feature, I don't know about RIM and Microsoft who I would think would rather push silverlight so someone other then Microsoft.com will use it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How true. Even Silverlight runs circles around flash for streaming video performance. I can watch Netflix movies stutter free on my netbook, but Flash videos on Hulu peg the processor and are almost unwatchable because of it.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,'
I've never been impressed by a single thing I've seen come out of Adobe.
PDF? Bloated, fragile, and buggy.
Acrobat? Bloated, underfeatured, and clunky.
PhotoShop? Bloated, cumbersome, and twitchy.
Flash? Bloated, fuzzy, and restrictive.
Something as distinctive and ripe for improvement as video delivery is the ideal place for open-source development. Bugs and misfeatures won't survive, while improvements will be implemented continuously. And if the people in charge of the code base won't keep up with user needs, someone will fork it and move on.
Flash on the Android is not such a big deal since noone are making any money on that platform anyway.
Hmm, that's odd. I seem to have made money on my android app that I'm selling in the Market. This one falsehood in your post is enough to make the entire thing hogwash.
Get your facts straight before you post.
In just the last few months, I have noticed a large number of mainstream news sites ditching flash, as well as automobile companies.
I think flash will live on for a long time, on life support. However its days in the sun are over.
By itself, video is still a one way street.
Sort of -- a few years ago I played around with ustream, and on my old Linux laptop (Slackware), Flash had no trouble at all streaming my webcam (two-way street). Despite the fact that Flash on Linux, uh, sucks, the fact that the V4L integration actually worked boggled my mind.
I did find it rather amusing that Flash would let me stream video from my laptop, but my machine was still too slow to play youtube videos (this was before youtube started supporting HTML5).
A lot of people on the internet were fired up about Froyo bringing Flash 10.1 support.
Well I have Froyo now and Flash TOTALLY KILLS performance on pages that use it. Stupid ads.
Apple doesn't control either the mobile, or the media market. They aren't #1 in any particular market except for possibly iPod's, which aren't really a market for flash anyway. They don't have a proprietary 'product' that competes with Flash/Adobe either. Too many people try to make it out as some sort of personel vendetta from Steve to Adobe, but given Adobe's horrible track record when it comes to security, it's lack of support for modern platforms like x64 (which I might remind folks, have been around for a decade and we're only now seeing support). Would you want to allow such a product on to your platform, with the potential to end up supporting thousands of applications (indirectly of course). Security issues would be even worse. A potential flaw like the recent Apple bug that allowed jailbreaking on the iPhone is an excellent example. Apple patched their own within a few weeks. They would be completely at the mercy of Adobe if such a bug existed in Flash. Would you put yourself willingly in that position?
I have an iPad (along with computers running Linux, MacOS X, and Windows). Honestly, the only thing on the web I care about that Flash provides is video. None of the "tools" or "interactivity" matter to consumers. What matters is "someone sent me this video of a dancing cat, and I can't see it". If that problem gets solved, Flash goes away. Only the items dealing with DRM and codecs are really of interest here, and to be honest, the HTML5 codec issue is not much of an issue when Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome all solved it. That one comes down to Firefox and free software that unfortunately relegates it into an unenviable position in the marketplace.
The thing about Flash that proponents don't seem to consider is that adding it to touch devices doesn't make interactivity work. I've tried Flash on my N900, which has a crappy touchscreen and Flash support, and most interactivity doesn't work on a touchscreen. There are no mouse-enter, mouse-exit, or mouse-down events in a touch environment.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Funny how even the cheapest netbooks can do it, and laptops at the $400 price point are now doing 1600x900 native.
Want to develop a cross-platform game? Forget HTML5 - flash is the way to go - it works NOW on PCs, laptops, even game consoles (go to http://alphagfx.com/ and try one of the 9x9, 12x12, or 17x17 games on a Wii - the 9x9 are native resolution, but the others downscale just fine).
The only other option even close is Java - and Java sucks for game development (and how many people want to run your java app anyway?) So you have a choice - develop once for everyone except Apple iStuff, and do it a second time for His Jobsiness, or spend the same amount of time developing twice as much for +90% of the market. The math is simple - Flash beats Apple.
wasn't adobe one of very few platforms that kept producing their software suites for apple through their lean years?
Sure ... with with smaller feature sets and sometimes years behind the Windows versions. Apple put Adobe on the map and Adobe turned their back on Apple when they were down. Good business decision by Adobe? Probably. Does Steve Jobs have a memory like an angry vindictive elephant? Probably.
To the best of my understanding, this is why flash takes so much CPU processing power to play a video.
Hopefully they will be addressing this now that they're going mobile, and working on a lot of optimizations..
Check out this NetSteam class, which is used to stream videos from the internet or your hard drive:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/NetStream.html?allClasses=1
In particular, the bufferLength property reads:
"If any [thing] causes bufferLength to increase more than 600 seconds or the value of bufferTime * 2, whichever is higher, Flash Player flushes the buffer and resets bufferLength to 0"
Translation?
If flash player loads a video to the point that fills it's buffer size, it immediately flushes it's buffer and reloads the video into the buffer, and then it will flush it's buffer and reload the video into it's buffer, and then it will flush it's buffer.. etc
You can see where I am going with this. It's absurd.. but this is what appears to be going on to me.
The alternative is to set a really high buffer time, and make it so the entire video gets loaded into the buffer so the bufferLength is rarely greater than bufferTime*2. but then it will take much longer to begin playing so I doubt you have ever come across any code on the internet that actually does that..
I became aware of this when I was using flash to load a video on my local hard drive and received hundreds of buffer flush events.. one after another, after another, after another.
Having said all that, I think Flash has a lot of things going for it.. It just needs a little work still..
Adobe is obviously trying, but I think the talent is spread too thin. Some of their flash classes are written really well and some are written really poorly.
It's not that Flash isn't still used or won't go away, it's that there is no end of things to do on my iPhone as it is. Every once in a while I run across a web site that requires flash. What do I do? I don't use it. Their loss much more so then mine. I'm not saying there aren't things out there I wish I could use on my iPhone, only that other things weigh more heavily for me, and in any case it just hasn't been a big deal. If it's some site I really want to access I'll send them a message and request that they make their site compatible with iOS and non-Flash. Sometimes they do that. Sometimes they don't. I'll live.
--- What?
People, can't we all just...get along? Lets be honest folks, we know why Jobs blocked flash, and I seriously doubt it had to do with developers or performance, it was all about control. Anybody who has watched Jobs over the years knows the man is a SERIOUS control freak, always has been, always will be. Now to some that is a good thing, since by having serious control he is able to insure the user experience is consistent, and that pretty much any iStuff "just works" the way you expect it to. Now personally I like to tinker too much to give up that much control, but I can certainly see why some would prefer it.
As for TFA, I'd say the reason why flash will not being going away anytime soon is the same as the video we make fun of the Ballmer Monkey for..Developers developers developers developers. Hell with some of the easy to use flash tools out there my 16 year old kid who has never made a website in his life could make a cool website with minimal fuss. The flash toolset is well known, mature, and frankly easy to throw something together in and have it work, just like how programmers fucking HATED VB but watched in horror as it spread like the clap thanks to it being so damned easy to pick up and make something functional with. Same thing here.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...Let's try to get it off Laptops/Desktops as well!
The reason I really dislike is that it kills performance on the Mac side by causing massive overuse of the CPU as others have mentioned. The bitter irony here is that despite what reason #3 may state, the reason that Flash is such a CPU resource hog on the Mac is because Adobe has yet to rewrite it so that it uses the Mac's Core frameworks that are specifically setup to allow developers to use GPU hardware acceleration rather than continually tying up the CPU (which makes it especially ironic that Adobe has yet to grasp this given the history of the development of Quartz)!
As for reason #1, regarding Android use of Flash, that's great, I mean it's not like the platform wasn't fragmented enough, now we get to add yet another potential division between OS versions depending on whether or not the phone hardware supports Flash!
As if the rest of the article wasn't idiotic enough, I love how the writer thinks that Silverlight could still potentially dominate the market, given how many major companies have bailed from using it for the past year!
The sooner HTML5 is finalized as a standard the better as far as I'm concerned....
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
Funny how even the cheapest netbooks can do it, and laptops at the $400 price point are now doing 1600x900 native.
There's a problem with picking one aspect and using it to claim technical superiority... while ignoring form-factor, battery life, integration, that big-arsed touch-enabled screen, etc.
Mind you, I don't have an iPad. I have an HP Mini 2200 (originally came with 'doze, but now running Ubuntu Netbook Remix - a slight improvement, IMHO).
Here's the deal (on either OS for this thing):
Given all of this and more? Unless Adobe gets its shit together (along with the developers using it), Flash will remain a crippled, bug-ridden vehicle that actually worsens the experience. And notice how I never mentioned the intrusive advert tricks (specifically LSOs), and/or malware
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
on my Evo 4G, Flash is actually very usable. It defaults to blocking flash on sites (flashblock style), so you have to click on an element for the Flash content to load. Otherwise, the internet would be unusuable with all the Flash ads that would load up. It will slow down other aspects of the phone a bit and it sucks battery (at least watching a Flash video will), but I'd still much rather have it for those inevitable sites that are Flash only...
Having used flash on the HTC Desire and Nexus One on a regular basis, that's bollocks. Flash performs well on those platforms. Any slowness experienced is due to crappy 3G networks and typically goes away after switching to Wifi.
"User Experience" is also bollocks. It's a marketing buzzword that can be changed to mean whatever the user wants it to mean. User Experience is subjective and based on perception so it cannot effectively be "designed" or "evolved" as each individual user has a different user experience. Apple marketing likes using this term because it is so non-specific that if a user has a different experience they can blame the entire thing on the user.
Apple banning flash entirely about control. Control over the application ecosystem and ensuring that Apple users are still beholden to Apple's supply chain.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.