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Dear Flash plugin, love OSX
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- g0atbutt 17y agoAdobe is ridiculous. Flash on OS X is a joke. It makes sense why Apple is so hesitant to allow it on the iPhone.
- houseabsolute 17y agoSilverlight is even more unstable for me in Safari, and Flash is fine for me in non-Safari browsers. I don't know if this is everyone's experience, but on my part I'm more inclined to blame Apple and Safari than Adobe. On the slowness front, maybe Flash is slower on Mac, but it's hard for me to fault Adobe on this either (even as a Mac user). If I had finite resources, I too would allocate more of those to the majority platform.
- jrnkntl 17y agoSilverlight is a breeze in Safari for me. It doesn't eat all of my CPU and the fans keep it down. When I watch a flash movie however on my Mac the fans kick in and it sounds like it's gonna take off or something. Click2Flash let's me load the m4v equivalent on youtube but that's unfortunately only for youtube.
- houseabsolute 17y agoInteresting. I'm using Click2Flash and I had tried the m4v option, but I get consistently lower framerates for that than with Flash on Leopard.
- puffythefish 17y agoI've noticed that either using Snow Leopard or using the "Play fullscreen in QuickTime" option cause better framerates. I think it has to do with support for the <video> tag.
- puffythefish 17y agoThey support this for Vimeo now as well.
- alextgordon 17y agoI just did a very unscientific test, playing the same video in both Safari and Firefox. In both cases Flash used approximately 50% CPU. For comparison, playing a higher resolution video in Quicktime yielded about 15% CPU.
- jdowdell 17y agoPrecisely. QuickTime on Macs can use hardware-based video decompression. If Apple allowed browser plugins to move video-decompression out of the CPU too, then that would be great.
- htsh 17y agoIs 10.1 going to use hardware on the mac? I've read conflicting reports on this.
- jdowdell 17y agoSorry, I haven't heard of any progress on this yet... here's the best current guidance I've seen: <em>"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."</em> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1_hardware_acceleration_print.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...
- m_eiman 17y agoIf Apple allowed browser plugins to move video-decompression out of the CPU too, then that would be great. What prevents the plugins from using hardware? They're binaries that can run anything they want, aren't they?
- tensafefrogs 17y agoThey can, but then they have to hand the result back to the browser to render, which can be slow. Check out the new stuff coming in flash player 10.1, which will have some hardware acceleration, BUT not on OS X because it requires updated video drivers. Since Apple controls the video drivers on OS X, we just have to wait for them to update them (and since they don't seem to like Flash much, it could be a while).
- roach 17y agoI think it's one reason browsing the web can be so much better on the iPhone (try ESPN on the iPhone vs the desktop as an example). I hope the tablet doesn't support flash either and forces web sites to provide non flash versions of their sites.
- mcav 17y agoIs there a technical hurdle that has given Adobe performance problems on OS X? Or is it really just the relative market share leading to few development resources on Mac?
- peyton 17y agoIt's probably both. Couldn't find the source, but I remember it having to do with the OS X driver API and how it doesn't let you do the same kind of low-level voodoo that makes Flash work on Windows. And with limited resources, Adobe probably hacked something together that ran "Hello world!" and shipped it. I'd like to hear an Adobe engineer's point of view.
- lurch_mojoff 17y agoI don't think Adobe have given any explanation. Neither have they given any sign that they are working on fixing the performance and stability issues. It seems to me that Adobe's position can be summed up like this - "That's not a priority for us. Learn to live with it." As an example of this there is this mini-flamewar between John C. Welch and Adobe's John Dowdell: http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/06/doing_it_wrong.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/06/doing_it_wrong.html
- RWilson 17y agoI would really, really love to know the answer to this too. It's hard to describe my surprise that my 5-year-old PC, with a low power 1.6Ghz CPU, can easily breach 100fps while playing JamLegend, and my 9-month old, dual-core 2.66Ghz MacBook Pro can barely squeak out 40fps. Speaking of framerate in Flash, setting the framerate on a particular SWF does not actually make the SWF run at that framerate, even if the client machine can run at that framerate. Rather, the framerate seems to be more a measure of CPU resources dedicated to running the SWF. For example, back to JamLegend: My MBP can run JamLegend at 40fps, but not if the framerate is set to 40fps. If it's set to 40fps, I'll get 20. It it's set to 60fps, I'll get 30. In order to get 40fps, the framerate has to be set to 100. Meanwhile, on my old XP machine, setting it to 40 gets 40, 60->60, and 100->100. So, very good question, why is it that Flash performance is so different on OS X than Windows?
- ned 17y agoFor me the single best web experience improvement in the last year has been to install ClickToFlash: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/ http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/ Suddenly, Safari didn't slow down or crash unexplicably, fantastic.
- tfh 17y agoflashblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433) is one of the first addons I install for firefox.
- ianbishop 17y agoI think the only thing that would make my Safari experience more wonderful would be ClickTo(Animated)Gif.
- mcav 17y agoIf you're willing to get rid of all gifs, toss this in your user stylesheet: img[src$=".gif"] { visibility: hidden; }
- brandon 17y agoBefore there were dozens of decent ad-blocking extensions out there I was a big user of Privoxy. It had an action called "deanimate-gif" that would display only the first frame of the animated image. I'm not sure if Privoxy was downloading the whole image in the background in order to extract the first frame, and I don't know if deanimation used less CPU or RAM than just displaying the animated versions, but I loved the feature regardless.
- ugh 17y agoStrangely, ClickToFlash makes Flash crash more on my Mac. Whenever I click on it the browsers stalls for two or three seconds, my hard drive goes crazy and then it might work. Or crash. Since crashing Flash has become relatively painless in recent times (just reload the browser) I still leave ClickToFlash on, but it's a strange behavior nonetheless.
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- Zak 17y agoAnybody who thinks that sounds bad should try running Flash on a PowerPC. It can't play standard size Youtube videos at an acceptable framerate on a G5, while it provides acceptable performance on an Atom-powered netbook running Windows. The situation on Linux is a little better, but performance and reliability are still poor. Developers should keep this in mind when choosing to use Flash as a cross-platform environment.
- mortenjorck 17y agoMy parents have an old G4 iMac. Despite its age, it has no trouble with high-resolution h.264 videos in Quicktime. And yet QVGA Youtube clips play at about 3-6fps.
- jdowdell 17y agoToo bad the original post doesn't accept comments. Yes, Mac performance can be an extra challenge -- think of discussions in 3D, video-editing, or gaming communities. Things get more complicated when you're in a browser -- particularly on a Mac, you can see changing performance when changing browsers. Video will continue to further improve on PCs with hardware decompression, but on Macs Adobe is still hoping to persuade Apple to open those APIs to browser plugins. Adobe's own goal is to make things transparent across hardware/OS brands. And Adobe is interested in adding authoring-support for "HTML5": http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/06/adobe_on_html5.html http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/06/adobe_on_html5.html
- tumult 17y agogoogle's opengl browser plugin, which works fine, speaks otherwise. it's not an api problem. it's that adobe's software is shit.
- larsberg 17y agoThe 10.1 beta2 for OSX is slightly less horrible (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/). It's still just as crashy, but slightly less CPU-killing.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoTry Flash on Ubuntu. Things like VDPau are open source and can be leveraged for GPU acceleration, yet it's still not there. Besides video and games, I have zero clue what it's useful for. Shitty band websites?
- tensafefrogs 17y agoYou say that like "video" and "games" aren't a huge industry.
- mortenjorck 17y agoI've worked in Flash for a decade. My experience with it has gone from dabbling with it in high school to experimenting with it in college to doing serious AS development in professional design work. I've come to a certain level of familiarity with and acceptance of its shortcomings, while trying to hone my sense of where it is and isn't appropriate to use. And alas, it feels like that "is" part gets just a tiny bit smaller every day. For all its quirks and annoyances, Flash is a great environment and it opened the door to really rich web experiences long before the W3C ever imagined them. It still has a lot of advantages today, but the W3C is quickly catching up, and I get a definite sense that Adobe is losing the focus that Macromedia once had. They're continuing to develop Flash as if today were just a futuristic version of 2003. But Flash isn't going to stay relevant in a vacuum. One of these days, someone (maybe even Apple) is going to come out of nowhere with a beautiful, visual HTML5 Canvas + JS authoring suite and Adobe is going to realize just what they've been taking for granted. And by then it may be too late.
- saikat 17y agoSome already exist. Check out Cappuccino (which I use and has been amazing) or Sproutcore (which Apple now owns, I think). There are others as well.
- Tichy 17y agoI for one can't wait for that day to arrive. Sorry about your livelihood, but I trust that you'd find it easy to retool for HTML5+JS.
- amadiver 17y agoApple doesn't have a public API for Adobe to hook into to allow for hardware acceleration. As far as I know, there's nothing Adobe can do to remedy that situation. Adobe wants to bring better video performance to the Mac, but Apple is not supporting them. Here's the source: http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641 http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641
- Entlin 17y agoI don't buy that. Flash can do everything Parallels can, and - like the article said - inside Parallels flash is running faster!
- tensafefrogs 17y agoSo you are suggesting the Flash plugin starts up an instance of windows so it can utilize the hardware acceleration? The issue here (with the 10.1 hardware acceleration) is that it requires updated video drivers, and Apple controls those drivers on OS X, and Apple hates Flash. Maybe they will eventually add support, but why would they hurry if they don't like it in the first place?
- jodrellblank 17y agoHe is suggesting that if there is no public API for Flash to use then there isn't one for Parallels to use either, yet Parallels manages a better job running Flash in IE on Windows all virtualised than Flash manages on it's own. Parallels does not have updated video drivers from Apple, why should flash need them to match what parallels does now? Whatever Parallels installs or does to handle dismay updates, Flash plugin could do.
- tensafefrogs 17y ago"Parallels does not have updated video drivers from Apple" Parallels doesn't run in a browser.
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- nailer 17y agoAdobe is really hurting themselves here. If most of the use of Flash on the web is video, content creators now have raw Theora or H264 in <video> as stable alternatives, with Flash becoming an IE-only fallback mode.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- hoggle 17y agoThis might seem a little polemic - and it is - but I have been wishing Flash a quick death for years now. I simply hate it. No justification of existence for uncaring companies like that in the web of the year 2010. We don't need Flash!
- freetard 17y agoDear Flash plugin and Adobe, Fuck you.
- jsz0 17y agoThis is exactly what happens when you allow one proprietary plugin to become dominant. I have no doubt that that it's not in Adobe's best financial interests to devote more resources to the OSX Flash plugin. It's a small subset of the market. Most users are just going to suffer with what they have. Adobe loses nothing by offering a subpar experience on OSX at this point. I understand it's not realistic to simply say "don't use Flash, ever" because open standards aren't entirely interchangeable with the wide range of Flash apps out there. That being said we should certainly be trying to minimize the amount of Flash used on the Internet. As an avid user of Click2Flash I find it's quite easy to avoid Flash the majority of the time.