Slashdot Mirror
Flash On Android Is 'Shockingly Bad'
Hugh Pickens writes "Ryan Lawler writes on GigaOm that although many have touted the availability of Flash on Android devices as a competitive advantage over Apple's mobile devices, while trying to watch videos from ABC.com, Fox.com and Metacafe using Flash 10.1 on a Nexus One over a local Wi-Fi network connected to a 25-Mbps Verizon FiOS broadband connection, mobile expert Kevin Tofel found that videos were slow to load, if they loaded at all, leading to an overall very inconsistent experience while using his Android device for video. 'While in theory Flash video might be a competitive advantage for Android users, in practice it's difficult to imagine anyone actually trying to watch non-optimized web video on an Android handset,' writes Lawler. 'All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.'"
Flash on any platform is shockingly bad.
There are other things you can do with flash than just watch videos.
Is this really a shocking surprise? I don't mean to troll, but flash has brought us a lot of positives, but it runs so - so just about everywhere in my experiences.
At least Android users have the choice to install and view Flash content if they choose. iPhone users aren't allowed that choice.
I have Flash installed on my Moto Droid and have found performance quite lacking as well.
"All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad." Or perhaps this just means this is the first iteration of the Android OS to attempt Flash compatibility and it obviously needs more time to mature? I hate flash as much as the next guy, but with as much content as there is out there that is based on Flash, if Android gets it working properly, it will be a big advantage over the iPhone OS.
...really? I'd rather have the option than not, but I guess that's why I don't buy iStuff anymore.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I have been watching video without any issues from several sites, plus flash is not only video.
Its the OPTION of having flash that makes it so great. If you don't like it, don't use it. But you cannot negate the fact that many users actually enjoy it. Period.
"All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.""
You make it sound as if both were mutually exclusive. Maybe that was what Steve wanted you to believe and you bought into it? Wake up, Android DOES support HTML5 as well as the iphone, while having much better javascript performance - crucial for HTML5 stuff.
I am surprised such a gross simplified statement made it into slashdot. Yeah, I must be new here...
This has been my experience as well with my Droid. I realize that the droid is a bit slower than other Android phones, but I hadn't had any trouble with watching HTML5 video on it, so I expected similar results with Flash. I was wrong. The few times I did get it to play, after let the player buffer for several minutes (on WiFi) it played in the single digit frame rates. I uninstalled it after a few days, as sites that had HTML5 video available still defaulted to Flash if they detected it. Having access to HTML5 video on only a portion of sites is preferable to me to having Flash for Android available on all sites. That should say something about just how bad it is.
What can I say.
Leave the country, move somewhere with a 21st century mobile infrastructure.
Learn to smoke, casually.
Lose weight.
Wear better clothes.
Talk with an accent.
Use a Nokia.
In short, become European. Life is better.
Deleted
i've been fighting this battle with idiots for the last 2 days... on a battery powered device, optimization has real world side effects... running code through an additional platform layer increases latency and response time and consumes more resources (CPU/battery). as long as the hardware and operating systems vary greatly between devices, the best solution will always be writing and compiling applications natively for each platform.
My HTC NexusOne with flash 10.1 works fine. I haven't found a youtube video that won't play on it.
I haven't tried many flash games, because i haven't had a need to.
Even Strongbad's sbEmail's works fine. i don't notice any issues or lag or anything.
Perhaps he should look at not only his OS, but also his hardware and his connectivity, and also his expectations.
A phone is not a desktop. And if you don't have a physical keyboard, you're not going to be able to do certain things.
Given all that, I still prefer Android over iOS. and my phone over any of the iPhones.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
Open the browser on your phone then select: Menu -> More -> Settings -> Enable Plugins -> On Demand.
That means Flash is disabled by default and a placeholder will be displayed instead, but you just need to touch the green arrow to load and play the flash content if you want to see it. Works a treat, performance is fine, and if you really do want the content it's there with a single press.
Having said that, I find Flash performance to be fairly acceptable for the most part on my Nexus One anyway, and having it on demand like this is much, much, much better than being told you can't have it at all.
Flashblock is on most desktop browsers. And Opera will add it eventually. It's really one of the only things missing from their mobile browser, which is the best I've found for all other uses.
What we have here is a new phone platform that provides a very common and desired feature the IPhone will never have according to their lord and savior Jesus....I mean Steve Jobs.....therefore this uninformed writer feels Steve was right because it doesn't work flawlessly?!?! Wow what if we were to say that about all technology on new platforms?? Totally insightful there buddy!!!
Always worked fine for me. Including several flash games off websites I've wanted to waste a little time on. Maybe this guy needs a better provider if his videos load to slow. Reminds me of all the people who bought new computers in the late 90's early 00's only to complain that it was 'just as slow downloading stuff as the old one'.
*DrugCheese rants*
I never thought it'd be any good for most video.
How is it for non-video? Games? Simple non-video animations like StrongBad? Very simple video like the Zero Punctuation stuff?
(Full disclosure: today, I happen to be an iOS user and am content with the lack of Flash right now -- I usually disable it on my desktop too -- but I'm interested in how this all plays out, and willing to be persuaded.)
Down in the comments for the story, someone has posted this counterexample to youtube. In it, he uses Flash to watch the video complaining about how badly Flash video works on mobile phones on his mobile phone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9jfdltkUU
So instead of getting a consistent web experience you're basically deciding to play russian roulette with Flash content?
Brilliant.
It just works.
Except when the fucking browser crashes.
What a ridiculous comment. All he's saying is you can disable it by default and browse the web as you would normally, with the option to play flash content if you want. All flash content is russian roulette, no matter what platform you use. What does it matter if it's on your phone or not? No matter what you're getting a consistent web experience.
Spiral out. Keep going...
Maybe you should see on-demand Flash in action, rather than make up FUD about russian roulette and browser crashes without any facts to back your statements up.
I've been running Flash on my phone since June, viewing the Flash content I choose to on a daily basis. It's seamless enough that I hardly think about it. I've never had a browser crash from playing Flash content, there's no "roulette" involved. It does in fact "just work" (though I wouldn't go quite so far as to call it brilliant). And as a bonus, if I want to emulate an iPhone, I'm always free to uninstall Flash completely.
I'll take limp home mode over being stranded 100 miles from civilization, any day of the week.
A better car analogy would be having to drive your car in hot weather without air conditioning vs. being able to turn on air conditioning at the cost of your car abruptly slowing to 5 miles an hour. And then having the brakes start pumping themselves.
Get off my launchpad!
The most CPU power consuming part in watching episodes is the playing of the video it self.
And most modern machines (be it desktop with their graphic card or embed device with their SIMD & GPU units) *DO HAVE* hardware acceleration for most modern formats (that's what they use for video in HTML5. Or *should use* if the demo runs like a snail)
So if watching an episode is like a slideshow on these machines, it's a situation of :
- In the case of the Pentium 4 - no hardware acceleration being available (move to a Radeon HD 4670, they are available on AGP bus and *DO* feature H.264 acceleration, older AGP GPU may lack it)
- Hardware acceleration not taken advantage of (if this version of Flash is 100% pure ARM, and doesn't leverage the Neon SIMD extension, nor the embed GPU - Usually some PowerVR) - that would probably be moronic since there's lots of SIMD+GPU code floating around that could be harnessed for an Android Flash.
- Unsupported video format (there's SIMD+GPU code available for H264, older MPEG4 and other MPEGs, even for Theora, and soon WebM - But I don't know if there's for the older Flash Video codecs like VP6). In this case HTML5 won't save you either (or at least until HTML5 explicitly requires a specific codec, like WebM)
- Pure sloppy programming - if the rest of the Flash implementation is completely b0rked, no hardware accelerated magic can save the situation.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Uhhh...how exactly do you know it wasn't a problem? did they take measurements to make sure that there wasn't intermittent interference? Because I have set up quite a few Wifi systems for home users and intermittent interference can be a royal bitch sometimes. Unless he was out in the boondocks there are signals bouncing all over the damned place and a system that works good five minutes ago can be total shit now. Hell in just my apt I'm looking at about a dozen different Wifi routers bouncing signals in here of various strengths.
So unless they did seriously testing like Consumer Reports does I'd take anything they say regarding wifi with a grain of salt. In today's wireless enabled world the amount of interference you can get can really screw your day.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Video is a red herring. Bandwidth will catch up. It always does. Or have you forgotten the bad old days of watching postage-stamp-sized video barely playing from your hard disk, and not playing at all across the net?
Youtube works great on my N900.
However, other sites do not, like the Daily Show. But of course, sometimes the Daily Show videos don't work on my PC either. Original post has some merit.
Sorry, but you're wrong, and so is Apple. No users are directly "effected" unless they choose to be. By your same "logic", any baby that's not ideal for every possible use should be thrown out with the bathwater, and users should be prevented from having anything to do with those terrible things whether they want it or not.
Sure, Flash sucks for some videos - and it's fine for others. A lot of Flash games don't play well on a mobile device - but some do. Flash ads are annoying - but Flash animations like Homestar Runner are awesome, work great, and I can pick and choose when & what Flash I see. If HTML5 was a valid alternative right now, you might have a point, but it isn't, and won't ever be an alternative for all the existing flash sites out there.
The fact that this argument is still on-going shows that there is still much demand for Flash. Apple can choose to exclude those customers if it wants, you can buy into that if you want, but I for one am very very glad that Android is a viable alternative that gives me the choice of HTML5 and Flash.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You're basing HTML5's success based on what happened to floppy disks? How is that even remotely relevant? For one, HTML5 is the successor of HTML4, not Flash. It's not replacing Flash, it's replacing HTML4. CDs replaced floppies. There's an important difference there.
The truth of the matter is Flash if fucking everywhere. HTML5 isn't. Therefore, it isn't a viable alternative right now because most sites don't have an HTML5 version yet. In the future, fine, but that's also beyond the point. The point is that anything that can't run flash is experiencing a crippled Internet, simply because it's on so many sites. That's fine if you don't mind missing a bunch of content, but that shit doesn't fly with me or millions of other users, and that's why the big uproar.
Furthemore, flash ads can be blocked. Or, you can tell the browser to load plugins on-demand in android, which means that all Flash applications show up as a big box with a giant green arrow. Tap the arrow to load and run. No flash ads, but still run Flash when you want to. Works great. What's even better is that I'm presented with the choice.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
In Firefox. Currently it has completely pegged one of my cores, and has some birds flying around with a very jerky frame rate. Nothing else seems to be happening. So with a little bit of animation it can being FF to its knees. I don't know if it is supposed to be doing anything else, but Flash could do the bird thing easily, without slowing the browser down (other tabs are dog slow currently as FF uses only one core).
Now I know, I know, this was made for Chrome. Even warned me. Guess what? That is NOT a point in HTML5's favour. If things only work well on one browser that helps nothing. Firefox is a major in the browser market, only IE might have more marketshare (and FF may have overtaken it, haven't checked). So on the major browser this little thing can't even run at a good speed? On a fucking Core 2 Quad 2.8GHz?
With Flash it would run well, and do so on any browser.
Now, I'm not saying HTML 5 won't get better. I'm not saying that 5 years from now such a page won't run great on everything. What I'm saying is it doesn't NOW. HTML 5 is not ready for prime time in any way shape or form.
First all the major browsers need to support it well. By that I mean implement the features and be able to run it fast. It needs to be something that doesn't only work on certain browsers or slow things down badly and so on.
Next there needs to be good development tools. If you've ever actually used Flash, as in the actual Flash program not Flash Player, that's what I mean. Something that can design animation and interactive content easily and graphically. Writing lots of markup is not an acceptable method.
Only then, once browser support is good and the tools are good, should sites start transitioning to HTML 5 on a large scale. It has to be good for end users to use first, then sites can look at it.
As it stands, Flash gets shit done. Doesn't matter if you don't like it, it works.
What choice? Google has kill switches to kill apps as we've already seen. Most Android users I know have had to root their device to install many things on their device, an operation whose purpose is similar to jailbreaking an iPhone.
I'm tired of the Google soapbox, their pool is no better than the Apple pool.