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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.'"
How to we mark an entire story as -1, Flamebait?
Trolling is a art,
How is SJ holding the web at ransom if he is in such a weak position?
I've read a recent statistic that has said that of the 500m Facebook users, 100m visit via the iPhone. So 2% of web views depends entirely on the sites you count, and whether those sites actually make money from their web presence.
Back when Apple stopped shipping floppy drives with their computers just about 99% of 'manufactured' computers shipped with floppy drives. People said Apple was moving too fast. Now, a decade or so later, floppies have gone the way of the dinosaur.
There's probably quite a lot to make that analogy faulty. But I think Apple isn't holding anything randsom. They're just knowingly not supporting (what they see to be) old software.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
On the other hand, Steve Jobs was right. This is a bigger problem for Adobe. Let them admit thet they need some help wit Flash...maybe Linus hackers can help out.
Bottom line: Flash sucks on Android big time.
This:
mobile accounts for only 2.6% of web views, and the iOS share stands at only 1.1%.
is presumably measured over a single set time period and is not a rate of change. It says nothing about this:
iOS growth is "massive"
I have no idea what the ransom bit is on about tho. Troll?
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Just because hundreds of millions of people have it installed, doesn't mean they like it.
Silverlight is probably closer to what Flash's market penetration would be if Flash hadn't become a compulsory install. If it weren't installed by default. SIlverlight is only installed because it blocks the path to content that people want to see. There's no SilverlightTube (yet). Few Silverlight webgames. It's only there because people want access to what it blocks.
When the day comes where it isn't assumed you need Flash player in order to be a good Internet consumer, you can expect to see it's market share plummet.
The numbers also don't account for the amount of frustration Flash causes people who have to use it. It's only been recently (version 10.1.18xxxxxx) that I can run Flash on my MacBook and not have it cripple the performance.
I think they should give it a few years and see what happens. It smells a lot like the same argument that used to be thrown against Firefox when it had only been out a little while versus. IE's market share.
Look where that wound up.
Reeses
Because Firefox users have no need for flash or Ad blockers do they.
I presume you are implying that the reason people use Flash blocking tools is because all Flash content inherently needs to be blocked. This isn't true.
The overly-prevalent mindset on Slashdot that "Flash is evil", "Flash needs to die", and "Flash is only used for bad things" is just plain wrong and broken. Flash is used in many places to greatly enhance things beyond what browsers are normally capable of. Games are an obvious example, but other applications such as Google Finance and Amazon's song previews are simple but effective examples. As is usually the case, the technology itself isn't really good or bad, but what people do with it can be. And people, as a rule, are decidedly good at making technology do bad things.
This then leaves the question: Why do people block flash? Almost entirely it falls into two categories:
- Flash is used in the most perverse and annoying advertisements that contain video and audio and which load the CPU unnecessarily
- Flash has security concerns
Consider these. People champion HTML5 as some kind of messiah which will bring the end to Flash's evil reign. Okay, what would that result in? I'll give you a hint: HTML5 blockers. Why? Because soon we'll transition to:
- HTML5 is used in the most perverse and annoying advertisements that contain video and audio and which load the CPU unnecessarily
- HTML5 has security concerns
Personally, Flash doesn't really bother me, but that's largely because it can be controlled. I use NoScript, partially to block Flash, and that tamed beast can do useful work. I think most people who yearn for its demise either don't understand that the void Flash leaves behind will be filled with something (at least as "bad" as Flash, if not worse), or they're just mindless zealots regurgitating Jobs' claims.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I'm really curious how Silverlight got to 51% unless it's a default install for Windows 7 or something of the sort. So far I've only seen it in the wild three times: Photosynth, the Feynmann Lectures (posted by MS...), and some random video at MSNBC or similar news site. I don't even really know what it does, so how is it at 51%? I'm really not trolling; I'm genuinely curious.
And to generalize a bit, what do statistics like this actually say? I promise you my parents don't know what Flash is, although they've probably seen plenty of irritating animated ads. The numbers they quote for Apple and Flash are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but based on their numbers for Silverlight versus the apparent usage of Silverlight, I'm having a tough time deciding what to take away from this article.
"In Steve Jobs' case, with only 1.1% market share, the would-be emperor isn't even wearing any clothes."
Dear Slashdot,
Please do not ever make me picture Steve Jobs naked again.
Thank you.
The university I work for has over 25 to 30 percent (5000 +) of it's staff using iOS devices. We gathered this info from our Exchange system. Students don't use Exchange so these are mostly well established professors and staff not a bunch of upstart kids. We have reason the believe the percentage of students using iOS is well over 30% if not closer to 50%. It's important to note that if you own an iOS device you also own a computer of some kind. People aren't using one device to access all content and iOS is by far the primary mobile platform if you are talking about small form factor or phones. You just can't produce stats that say otherwise. And yes Android is moving fast up the stats and they don't like Flash on it. Just think of all the Flash adds you are missing.
It all starts at 0
strong market position.
"strong" is not the criterion. "dominant" is more like it.
You can hardly claim Apple has "dominant" market position.
Silverlight would be dead if it weren't for Netflix. I really wish they'd use something else ( although, honestly, it seems to outperform every Flash-based video service on my lower end computers ).
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.
No, no. You have it all wrong.
HTML5 is going to save the internet from bloat and security problems.
Also, with HTML5, videos might play in webages if you have the appropriate codec the site's content was encoded with, and your browser can tap into it properly.
It's just like the tag which worked decades ago, but it's new and therefore magically better.
Flash is useful, but the implementation is not very good. There is no need to use 100% of CPU to animate a couple of little squares on a screen. Yes, maybe the flash content author sucks. But he is using Adobe stuff.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
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 would-be emperor isn't even wearing any clothes.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it seems like a failed attempt to be clever. "It's like the emperor's new clothes, except this time... HE ISN'T EVEN WEARING ANY CLOTHES!" He's not wearing clothes in the original story.
At the end of the day it's going to be the FCC settling this debate. Limiting consumer choice is never a good idea when you have a strong market position (like Apple's with mobile devices). The US government tends to frown on that in the long run.
Imply much, say little. That's often a cheap trick to appearing insightful while being difficult to prove wrong. A common strategy to appease the slashbots and win cheap karma points. Unfortunately, your implications are just simply wrong.
1) Why would the FCC get involved? What possible business would they have in deciding whether or not Apple supports Flash? You know that the FCC is the Federal Communications Commission - they oversee Telecom and radio/TV, mostly. Did you mean the FTC?
2) Why would the FTC get involved? There's nowhere NEAR a monopoly - Android devices currently outsell iPhones, and iPhones aren't likely to explode and kill little babies, nor is there any particular misrepresentation about what the iPhone is and does. It's a smart phone that looks nice, and that's what Apple is selling.
3) Apple doesn't have a particularly commanding lead on mobile devices, see previous point - iPhones are only about 35% of the market depending on what survey you look at and when it was taken.
4) Since when does the gubbmint frown on limiting choice? Perhaps if there's a monopoly, (which there isn't) and even then, it's not limiting choice, even as a monopoly, but using your ability to distort the marketplace to prevent competition, a process called "dumping".
You'd do well to look up dumping, because even what you are implying is simply dead wrong.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Not too worried about HTML5 'filling the void' myself. NoScript covers a large number of the potentially obnoxious uses already. The same techniques used for blocking Flash object/embed elements can be trivially extended to canvas, video and audio elements. CSS animations can be manipulated in the DOM (or at load time) to either strip them out completely, remove unconstrained animations, or toggle them on and off.
Better yet, though, video and audio elements can just have autoplay disabled. The asset can begin to download, so you don't need to wait, but there's no way for some fuckface web designer to decide their choice about when the video plays trumps yours; no more videos starting up in two or three tabs at once. Very hard to do with Flash, very easy to do with a video element.
How to we mark an entire story as -1, Flamebait?
Let's see, Steve Jobs says a technology is complete crap and nobody would ever want to use it. So, that means in a year and a half, Jobs will be having a Flash love-in on stage somewhere.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was blocking flash before there ever was such a thing as iPhone or iOS. Between my household and office computers I have it blocked in 7 browsers. But all 7 of my browsers are counted in that "97% of web surfers have Flash installed" statistic.
I have an iphone. I use it for, oh, a good five or ten percent of my browsing. If that. ... But if a site doesn't work on it, I tend to stop going to that site even when I'm on a different browser. Because I had a bad experience and I didn't like it.
It doesn't matter how many page hits are iOS; it matters how many page hits are from users who use iOS enough of the time to notice that your page didn't work from their mobile browser.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Finally, the voice of reason.
I use Flashblock because I want to use Flash services on the web.
The problem isn't flash, it's how certain organisations use flash. This isn't the fault of flash but it is something I have to deal with (have dealt with). If Flash died tomorrow, I guarantee you by Friday (+8 GMT) all the punch the monkey ad's on the web would have been converted to HTML5. Apple and Apple fanboys are benefiting from the same thing that they've always benefited from, lack of negative interest. HTML 5 is better right now because there's no money in writing HTML 5 ad's at the moment, this does not scale. If HTML5 becomes dominant it will become just as unusable as an un-flashblocked browser because Flash is not the motivation for all the Flash annoyances on the web.
Put simply, blame the ad producers, not the conduit they use to display ads.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Well it would explain a lot that he gets paid to say this. Why he feels the need to drag actual computers into something that is strictly about small portable devices. Gee, next hell tell us that everybody making cell phones is a dickhead, because 99% of PCs have a DVD or at least a CD-ROM drive, so not having one must mean you are taking the silvery disk buying community at ransom.
Fandroids hate facts.
Wait, so a programmer who uses a polling loop instead of an event listener is blameless, but Flash is responsible for all of the CPU usage? Puhleez. Flash is just a tool, and can be very efficient when used properly.
Join the window installer's union, where prosperity is a brick throw away!
It's super easy to have 97% installation base when the IT guys behind MOST of the Fortune 500 bundle them in their Windows desktop builds and some of the most highly-visited web sites out there (YouTube, a few news sites, a couple of amazing porn sites, etc) still require Flash. Same goes for Silverlight (though Microsoft bundled that in Windows Update, so its numbers should be higher).
HTML5 video isn't there yet. For starters, Firefox doesn't support H.264, which is the de facto video streaming codec at the moment. Even if it wasn't, Theora doesn't hold a candle to it and seems to be in the middle of growing pains. VP8 is coming, but it isn't here yet. HTML5 YouTube doesn't work all the way yet. Worse still, differences in CPU performance with HTML5 when compared to Flash have been shown to be negligible. (In fact, some of the stats on that page show that Flash 10.1 is more efficient with its CPU utilization.) Worst, and most importantly, of all, tons upon tons of people are still on IE6, which doesn't support HTML5.
I think we all agree that, on paper, HTML5 is a great idea and will do more to unite a powerful web experience with the convenience of mobile computing. In practice, however, it's still very nascent and will take a while before it supplants Flash, et. al. And I guarantee you that Adobe will be on top of that (unless they're stupid and become a numb bystander to their own death).
Steve Jobs listed 6 reasons why Flash wasn't going on iOS devices. In the very last sentence of his thoughts on flash he says:"Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind." While you may not agree with any of the six reasons, Jobs said Flash is archaic is being asserted as the only reason. Also I don't know about anybody else but my understanding is that Jobs has always talked about Flash on mobile devices (Reason#4 was battery life). Even if mobile browsing represents 2.6% of web usage, 1.1% represents 42% of mobile devices. That's a rather large percentage of mobile users.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Flash + silverlight = can play video = browser plugins = win for particular corporations with vested interests to win at any cost
HTML5 (ie iOS, firefox 4) = can play video = html5 inside webbrowser = open standards = win for all
The "particular corporations with vested interests" being the MPEG-LA members, I take it? There are two kinds of video codecs: those that work in Safari for iOS and don't work in Firefox 4, and those that work in Firefox 4 and don't work in Safari for iOS. Apple has chosen not to implement any permissively licensed audio or video codec in Safari for iOS, not Vorbis, not Theora, and not VP8. How is this any improvement over the QuickTime vs. Windows Media Player war that existed before FLV?
But you can already make a web app on iOS that bypasses the store
Of course you can in theory. It'll just run dog slow because the JavaScript engine reportedly isn't a JIT compiler, and it won't be able to use any feature of the hardware that the Safari DOM doesn't expose. For example, how well does WebGL run? Can web apps prompt the user to turn on the mic or camera?
What a series of ridiculous assertions.
Silverlight penetration now stands at 51%
What a surprise. Anything bundled with windos and IE will reach numbers like that quickly and easily. If they were to add a cooking recipe to IE, they would reach those numbers with it. In fact, given the de-facto monopoly especially in companies, and that it was lobbied/bought as the only choice if you wanted streaming videos of the last two Olympics, that is a surprisingly low number
while 97% of web surfers have Flash installed
Flash was introduced in 1996. That was 14 years ago. And for many of those years it was a de-facto standard for the loud and colourful parts of the web (games, movie sites, anything that wanted "more interactivity").
And then he compares two plugin technologies to an operating system. Because, you know, 27% of elephants have one leg slightly shorter than the other, which clearly proves that the 32% of plane flights that are delayed is a much too high number!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Jobs is correct, IOS owns the mobile smart phone market.
Really? When did iOS smartphones outstrip Symbian or RIM? And I guess Android passing iOS for new smartphone sales never happened, either...
iOS barely made it to 3rd place, and is now starting to slip down to 4th, probably to be firmly entrenched there sometime early next year, as Android moves into 2nd behind Symbian.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What people don't get is that Jobs makes his claims based on reason and foresight, not on current numbers. And what you will have to admit, most of the time he is dead on.
I don't like Apples Content Delivery Lock-In as much as the next guy, but what most people rarely get when talking about Steve Jobs and the things he claims is that this guy actually knows what he is talking about.
He said it time, and time again: Flash got a no-go on the iPhone BECAUSE ADOBE COULDN'T GUARANTEE A MINIMUM PERFORMANCE without hogging the entire iPhone CPU! And given, that is, of course, due to the VM nature of Flash. Ever since the dawn of ActionScript 2, Flash is a plattform, not a mere animation plugin. ... Ok, so this is Slashdot, and most people contiuously ragging on Flash here don't know squat what it actually is all about, but I guess I'll never give up trying.
Get it in to your freaking skull: Steve said it time and time again: NO VMs and no inner frameworks or inner operating systems on the iPhone. Period. End of story. I might emphasise that he was absolutely right with his strategy, hence the bizarly massive return on investment the iPhone line is racking in to this very day. Check out the smooth performance of the iPhone and the third-party apps crutching around on last generation Android Phones to see what I'm talking about.
And I am *not*, I repeat *NOT* an iPhone fanboy - in fact, I am, if at all, most probably going to replace my BlackBerry with an Android Phone whenever the need arises. Given, I might take an iPhone after all, if Android and Ubuntu 10 turn out to be just as prissy as last years versions.
Now go ahead and mod me into oblivion.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Anyone else around here wondering why Cisco is not suing the shit out of Apple for using the name IOS? I'd expect that.
No. No-one else around here is wondering.
Nope. The issue is that a lot of countries are now spending taxpayer money to create IOS applications, which then end up on a closed, even walled platform. All this because those in charge believe the Apple hype and think that 90% of the people are using an iPoney. And this is not a Good Thing (tm). Reality Distortion at its finest. I will never switch to an Iponey due to its closed nature, however this won't stop my government and many government funded organisations to throw money at Apple oriented products.