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The Surprising Statistics Behind Flash and Apple
Barence writes "PC Pro's Tom Arah has dug up some statistics that cast severe doubt over Steve Jobs' assertion that Flash is the technology of the past, and Apple's iOS is the platform of the future. He quibbles with Net Applications' assertion that iOS growth is 'massive,' considering that mobile accounts for only 2.6% of web views, and the iOS share stands at only 1.1%. By comparison, Silverlight penetration now stands at 51% while 97% of web surfers have Flash installed, according to Stat Owl. 'At least when Bill Gates held the web to ransom he had the decency to first establish a dominant position,' Arah claims. 'In Steve Jobs' case, with only 1.1% market share, the would-be emperor isn't even wearing any clothes.'"
I find that figure remarkable being as there have only been about 50 million iPhones (counting all generations) sold worldwide, according to Apple's quarterly reports.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Flash sucks even on real computers, I don't get why people get so worked up about this. Flash can die in a fire. A *poo* fire.
You need it for Netflix streaming. I know that's the only reason I have it installed on two of my computers, and that's the only thing it's used for.
Culture is more than commerce
It doesn't matter.
They aren't the real kdawson and CmdrTaco any more.
They've been replaced by a Python script.
The script cruises the firehose every 25 minutes and takes the top-scoring article no matter how stupid, stale, or binspam it is.
Every few hours it to the next name in the Poster-bot list, to give the impression that management is keeping the staff levels up.
Flash is dog, dog slow on OS X right now, even with a lot of CPU grunt, and it has nothing to do with Apple "blocking access to necessary APIs" or the lack of hardware accelerated h.264 that Adobe (or others) will try to claim. It really is woeful at all animation, even when H.264 video is not involved at all. An iPhone version would just be even worse, since there just isn't the CPU grunt to cover up how poor it is. You can get away with it on a desktop machine - you have a 2GHz cpu mostly idle that can help you out with your simple flash page, but on a mobile device you actually have to make the code decent.
The biggest reason there is no Flash on iOS is performance. The HTML5 and open web are secondary concerns.
The 10.1 release of flash is much better on OS X, but it is still a terrible resource hog for no good reason. Even the Mac Silverlight player is much better. I assume MS has the same "access" to the core of OS X as Adobe do.
Flash does have it's place. I use flash blocker to kill off most of the bad uses and just click the play button for the few good ones. Now if people would just avoid those tasteless flash pages for their websites. Usually I just hit the back button and try another site when I get one of those.
The OS has always supported right click, since at least OS 8.6 - just plug in a 2 button mouse, or use control+click. The single button was all about lack of confusion, but it was not "enforced" if you wanted to be able to right click. So, they listened to the feedback way back when OS 8 was the new thing (in 1997) and provided right click for those that wanted it. The only way this could possibly affect Mac sales if if people didn't actually do any research before purchase and just assumed. Perhaps this is why, in 2010, people still think you cannot right click on a Mac (not that you do think that, but I have seen it on slashdot).
All current Apple mice have right click. They haven't shipped a single button mouse for some time now. The wireless ones are multitouch too.
Flash on Android is interesting. I think that article really misses the fact that it does in fact work, but some sites are really not designed for touch. I found its pretty fun to watch videos on my phone on sites like escapist.com - you can't do that on IOS, but you can on Android and it does work and its not a battery drain.
There are in fact examples of HTML 5 based sites that totally fail on the ipod/iphone/ipad/android as well.
Apple hasn't shipped a mouse with only a single button in 5 years. Troll harder next time.
*www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjhF1xZQRQk - browser test is between the 6th and 7th minute
I'm guessing you missed that whole "HTML5 webpage showcase" that only worked on Safari and many of the functions weren't part of the normal sections of HTML5, and in fact needed OSX parts. These weren't the real HTML5 standards being discussed, but Apples version, right down to the fact it needed OSX to run properly (which happened to be proprietary)
You mean the HTML5 showcase that I just ran in Google Chrome and worked perfectly fine for the exception of the VR, however this same VR demo runs perfectly fine in the Chrome Canary build, meaning it's something that is indeed in the HTML5 definition.
Also, you may want to read this from the showcase: The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.
In other words: the whole point was bragging how they incorporated all that defined HTML5 goodness already. I doubt Google added the support to Chrome Canary just because Apple forced them to. Google is much more suborn than that.
Nah, they recanted. http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/26/facebook-actually-there-are-44-million-active-monthly-users-of/
This space for rent.
Well, the software is different, even if the hardware is the same.
Flash runs ok on my iMac if I reboot it into Windows XP, running on literally identical hardware, but is a hog under OS X.
The argument isn't at all silly.
Adobe's Mac version of Flash is just really poor, although better with the 10.1 release. Given how much iOS and OS X have in common under the hood (at least as common as Android and Linux, for example), it is not hard to see why Flash on the iPhone is a non starter, even if Apple wanted it.