4 ms·

> As Gruber says, when people say Flash support, they basically mean Youtube. He doesn't say this at all. He says "Flash is the way video is delivered over th

by teej 17y ago

> As Gruber says, when people say Flash support, they basically mean Youtube. He doesn't say this at all. He says "Flash is the way video is delivered over the web". Video is only delivered by Flash, but that doesn't imply that Flash only delivers video. Games are a huge source of Flash usage on the web. 75M people played Farmville last month alone. That's not an insignificant audience. Gruber points this out in the article, along with the reason why Apple doesn't care about Flash games. I don't disagree that smaller sites will probably take the lead of larger sites regarding front-end technology switches. But I believe this follow-after will happen more because HTML5 is the "cool new thing" not because Flash has somehow overnight become obsolete.

potatolicious 17y ago
The problem with Flash is that it's really, really slow. For most web-browsing PCs there's more than enough power under the hood to spare to account for the slowness of Flash (even then, Flash is sluggish on most machines, just not enough to be really annoying). On a phone or other slow-ish device, I cannot imagine how it could even hope to run. Look at the Palm Pre - a very good example of trying to run non-native code all over the place in a mobile device, and the whole thing grinds to a halt. Multi-tasking on the Pre is a bit of a joke because of it - sure you can do it, but not if you wanted some semblance of snappiness in your UI.
- teej 17y ago
  Sorry if I was unclear. I'm not arguing that mobile devices should run Flash. To be honest, I don't think they should, for the same reasons as you. I merely clarified that Flash has major uses beyond video and for that reason the adoption of HTML5 isn't going to kill Flash.
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  No, Flash itself isn't slow, but a lot of people are making a lot of Flash content that is hideously non-optimized, and a combination of that on a webpage can make anyone's computer slow to a crawl. And a precious few people are capable of creating good Flash content that is optimized and does run fast. Look at this for example: http://www.rockonflash.com/demos/pv3d/macworld/demo/as3/index.html http://www.rockonflash.com/demos/pv3d/macworld/demo/as3/inde...
- metamemetics 17y ago
  "The problem with Flash is that it's really, really slow." if you program a simple particle generator with say a 400x300 display, flash is a TON faster than canvas\javascript.
  - ido 17y ago
    Which browser? Can you post numbers by any chance (I'm genuinely interested - in my experience chrome and safari were sometimes several times faster than ff with canvas)?
- hexley 17y ago
  Adobe's excuse about not having a hardware acceleration API is a red herring, and a painfully obvious lie if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. There are several reasons I have come to this conclusion. 1. This is clearly demonstrated when you play a video "natively" through flash on OS X. Watch as the < SD resolution video immediately hogs an entire core of your CPU; in fact the lagging starts almost from the moment the flash object is initialized! Even a trivial operation like clicking fullscreen on a YouTube video locks up the entire host process and beachballs Safari for 5+ seconds as it sits there with it's thumbs stuck up it's arse, causing you to miss whatever was playing at the time. 2. Ok, so now try playing the same video through XP etc on VMWare or Parallels on the same machine. What's this? It's perfectly responsive and uses a small fraction of the CPU power? Apparently it is ≈5x less CPU intensive to emulate and deal with the overhead of virtualising an entire PC, it's CPU and associated operating system than it is to run the same thing natively on the host OS. *Note that due to limitations inherent in virtualisation, there is no access to any kind of video acceleration whatsoever, let alone assisted h.264 decoding. You have a framebuffer and that's about it (and even that highly abstracted, double buffered, composited and managed by Quartz as with every other window on the system) 3. My original MacBook which I still use has no hardware assist (GMA950) - yet QuickTime manages playback of fullscreen or windowed 1920x1080 h264 at around the same CPU usage playing a fucking YouTube video. 4. Flash video on the mac has always been excruciatingly slow, even before h.264. I remember seeing iMac G3 600Mhz's struggling to maintain even 15fps with postage-stamp sized h.261 (which is what YouTube used to use) just 5 odd years ago. A G3 600 is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what is required to playback video of that complexity. A G4 867 can do 640x480 h264. Clearly something is very very rotten in flash, and getting more offensively pungent by the day. Which now brings me to: What in the everloving FUCK could their code possibly be doing?!?! I think their programmers have quite clearly gone insane and subscribed to (or invented?) the Rube Goldberg school of software engineering - I don't see any other rational explanation. I'm quite certain we could have cured cancer while making SETI look like the equivalent of someone with a funnel stuck in their ear and pointed at the sky, what with the aggregate difference in CPU cycles of mac flash vs windows. Meanwhile, if Adobe can't even manage to lie effectively about the reasons why their own software is so utterly broken, I'm not holding my breath for a resolution. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, though if you ask them it's all Apple's fault. To think that people want flash on the iPhone. God almighty, haven't we all suffered enough?
roc 17y ago
Flash games only exist because everyone installed Flash to watch video. Before flash video hit, the installed-base wasn't that impressive/threatening.
- blasdel 17y ago
  Precisely the reverse is true. People installed Flash to play games and use artist / restaurant 'websites' made by new-media-douchebags. Flash video took off because of the enormous install base, and the ability to control presentation.
  - wmeredith 17y ago
    > artist / restaurant 'websites' made by new-media-douchebags. This is hilarious.
- teej 17y ago
  I find this hard to believe. A google answers query from 2005 puts Flash penetration at 98.2% (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/561724.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/561724.html) The article introducing the groundbreaking sIFR library from 2004 cites the reasoning for using Flash as high penetration (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr). Macromedia in the year 2000 puts their penetration rate at ~90% (http://web.archive.org/web/20001109224100/http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/ http://web.archive.org/web/20001109224100/http://www.macrome...) There is simply no evidence that points to video causing Flash to become a standard plugin.
  - kierank 17y ago
    Flash was included by default in Windows XP. It also has a simple update process.
- benologist 17y ago
  Video was barely emerging back when Flash began, ala RealPlayer and the like. Flash itself didn't even begin getting good video functionality till the 6th version (Flash MX) from memory.

by teej 17y ago

potatolicious 17y ago

The problem with Flash is that it's really, really slow. For most web-browsing PCs there's more than enough power under the hood to spare to account for the slowness of Flash (even then, Flash is sluggish on most machines, just not enough to be really annoying). On a phone or other slow-ish device, I cannot imagine how it could even hope to run. Look at the Palm Pre - a very good example of trying to run non-native code all over the place in a mobile device, and the whole thing grinds to a halt. Multi-tasking on the Pre is a bit of a joke because of it - sure you can do it, but not if you wanted some semblance of snappiness in your UI.

teej 17y ago
Sorry if I was unclear. I'm not arguing that mobile devices should run Flash. To be honest, I don't think they should, for the same reasons as you. I merely clarified that Flash has major uses beyond video and for that reason the adoption of HTML5 isn't going to kill Flash.
henrikschroder 17y ago
No, Flash itself isn't slow, but a lot of people are making a lot of Flash content that is hideously non-optimized, and a combination of that on a webpage can make anyone's computer slow to a crawl. And a precious few people are capable of creating good Flash content that is optimized and does run fast. Look at this for example: http://www.rockonflash.com/demos/pv3d/macworld/demo/as3/index.html http://www.rockonflash.com/demos/pv3d/macworld/demo/as3/inde...
metamemetics 17y ago
"The problem with Flash is that it's really, really slow." if you program a simple particle generator with say a 400x300 display, flash is a TON faster than canvas\javascript.
- ido 17y ago
  Which browser? Can you post numbers by any chance (I'm genuinely interested - in my experience chrome and safari were sometimes several times faster than ff with canvas)?
hexley 17y ago
Adobe's excuse about not having a hardware acceleration API is a red herring, and a painfully obvious lie if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. There are several reasons I have come to this conclusion. 1. This is clearly demonstrated when you play a video "natively" through flash on OS X. Watch as the < SD resolution video immediately hogs an entire core of your CPU; in fact the lagging starts almost from the moment the flash object is initialized! Even a trivial operation like clicking fullscreen on a YouTube video locks up the entire host process and beachballs Safari for 5+ seconds as it sits there with it's thumbs stuck up it's arse, causing you to miss whatever was playing at the time. 2. Ok, so now try playing the same video through XP etc on VMWare or Parallels on the same machine. What's this? It's perfectly responsive and uses a small fraction of the CPU power? Apparently it is ≈5x less CPU intensive to emulate and deal with the overhead of virtualising an entire PC, it's CPU and associated operating system than it is to run the same thing natively on the host OS. *Note that due to limitations inherent in virtualisation, there is no access to any kind of video acceleration whatsoever, let alone assisted h.264 decoding. You have a framebuffer and that's about it (and even that highly abstracted, double buffered, composited and managed by Quartz as with every other window on the system) 3. My original MacBook which I still use has no hardware assist (GMA950) - yet QuickTime manages playback of fullscreen or windowed 1920x1080 h264 at around the same CPU usage playing a fucking YouTube video. 4. Flash video on the mac has always been excruciatingly slow, even before h.264. I remember seeing iMac G3 600Mhz's struggling to maintain even 15fps with postage-stamp sized h.261 (which is what YouTube used to use) just 5 odd years ago. A G3 600 is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what is required to playback video of that complexity. A G4 867 can do 640x480 h264. Clearly something is very very rotten in flash, and getting more offensively pungent by the day. Which now brings me to: What in the everloving FUCK could their code possibly be doing?!?! I think their programmers have quite clearly gone insane and subscribed to (or invented?) the Rube Goldberg school of software engineering - I don't see any other rational explanation. I'm quite certain we could have cured cancer while making SETI look like the equivalent of someone with a funnel stuck in their ear and pointed at the sky, what with the aggregate difference in CPU cycles of mac flash vs windows. Meanwhile, if Adobe can't even manage to lie effectively about the reasons why their own software is so utterly broken, I'm not holding my breath for a resolution. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, though if you ask them it's all Apple's fault. To think that people want flash on the iPhone. God almighty, haven't we all suffered enough?

roc 17y ago

Flash games only exist because everyone installed Flash to watch video. Before flash video hit, the installed-base wasn't that impressive/threatening.

blasdel 17y ago
Precisely the reverse is true. People installed Flash to play games and use artist / restaurant 'websites' made by new-media-douchebags. Flash video took off because of the enormous install base, and the ability to control presentation.
- wmeredith 17y ago
  > artist / restaurant 'websites' made by new-media-douchebags. This is hilarious.
teej 17y ago
I find this hard to believe. A google answers query from 2005 puts Flash penetration at 98.2% (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/561724.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/561724.html) The article introducing the groundbreaking sIFR library from 2004 cites the reasoning for using Flash as high penetration (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr). Macromedia in the year 2000 puts their penetration rate at ~90% (http://web.archive.org/web/20001109224100/http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/ http://web.archive.org/web/20001109224100/http://www.macrome...) There is simply no evidence that points to video causing Flash to become a standard plugin.
- kierank 17y ago
  Flash was included by default in Windows XP. It also has a simple update process.
benologist 17y ago
Video was barely emerging back when Flash began, ala RealPlayer and the like. Flash itself didn't even begin getting good video functionality till the 6th version (Flash MX) from memory.