3 ms·

You're saying that Flash "clearly doesn't kill battery life" but then go on to say it's no worse than 3G... well, yeah, but lots of people have complained about

You're saying that Flash "clearly doesn't kill battery life" but then go on to say it's no worse than 3G... well, yeah, but lots of people have complained about 3G's effect on battery life, and much of the time both features will be used at the same time so the effect on battery life is "stacked". And keep in mind how much Flash you'll be running "unintentionally" doing just normal browsing (on 3G or not) in the form of ads and the like. Flash doesn't only come into play when you're playing Farmville. So this is something that affects a lot of browsing. On that note: how does backgrounding work in Flash Player 10.1? Can I play Flash-streamed audio in the background while I browse other pages (via "tabs") or use other apps? If not, that's one more plus for native apps over in-browser Flash. But if so, what happens if I have 5 different pages open, each with a couple of Flash ads -- do they keep executing in the background?

jasonlotito 16y ago
Those are good questions, and honest concerns. First, yes, 3G does "Kill battery life," but with regard to Jobs and Apple, they made it seem like Flash was something so much worse. While they never compared it to 3G, the sense was that it was a lot worse than it seems to be. Maybe a better approach is to say Flash doesn't kill battery life anymore than other Apple implementations of other technologies. As for the rest of your comment, that's more of an implementation thing. Done intelligently, most of what you are talking about is a non-issue. I'll try to explain. First, Flash doesn't have to run normally. Flash support can be activated. This avoids the torrent of flash ads that can run rampant on websites. However, if I go to a website, and I want to run the application there, I can choose to enable it. Something like this is already done with the YouTube app on the iPhone. You go to a video page, and you click on the Play button, a simple image. In Flash's case, it would explicitly enable the flash player to activate. People do this already in browser. They block flash for the most part, and enable flash in certain, particular cases. As for backgrounding v.s. native apps, that's a non-issue. Native apps will always be better, on any platform. The problem is, not every web app can have a native iPhone app. In your example, the flash web page could be treated like every other web page. In this case, does an HTML5 video continue playing if you open a new tab? Does it keep executing in the background? The idea isn't to recreate the native functionality, but give Flash support so existing media that exists now can be consumed. Media that HTML5 has no support for, and cannot deal with.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  If I had Flash on my phone, I'd definitely want it to have functionality like you describe, where you have to tap to enable it. I'm sure it won't be that way out-of-the-box, though, and only a small minority of users would know to install a ClickToFlash equivalent even if it were available. So the default and by far most used configuration will be one where Flash is running much of the time that 3G is running too. I certainly agree with you that it's not a dealbreaker for Flash in web pages to not be backgroundable. And I'd prefer it to be the case that it's not backgrounded in the general case.

jasonlotito 16y ago

Those are good questions, and honest concerns. First, yes, 3G does "Kill battery life," but with regard to Jobs and Apple, they made it seem like Flash was something so much worse. While they never compared it to 3G, the sense was that it was a lot worse than it seems to be. Maybe a better approach is to say Flash doesn't kill battery life anymore than other Apple implementations of other technologies. As for the rest of your comment, that's more of an implementation thing. Done intelligently, most of what you are talking about is a non-issue. I'll try to explain. First, Flash doesn't have to run normally. Flash support can be activated. This avoids the torrent of flash ads that can run rampant on websites. However, if I go to a website, and I want to run the application there, I can choose to enable it. Something like this is already done with the YouTube app on the iPhone. You go to a video page, and you click on the Play button, a simple image. In Flash's case, it would explicitly enable the flash player to activate. People do this already in browser. They block flash for the most part, and enable flash in certain, particular cases. As for backgrounding v.s. native apps, that's a non-issue. Native apps will always be better, on any platform. The problem is, not every web app can have a native iPhone app. In your example, the flash web page could be treated like every other web page. In this case, does an HTML5 video continue playing if you open a new tab? Does it keep executing in the background? The idea isn't to recreate the native functionality, but give Flash support so existing media that exists now can be consumed. Media that HTML5 has no support for, and cannot deal with.

glhaynes 16y ago
If I had Flash on my phone, I'd definitely want it to have functionality like you describe, where you have to tap to enable it. I'm sure it won't be that way out-of-the-box, though, and only a small minority of users would know to install a ClickToFlash equivalent even if it were available. So the default and by far most used configuration will be one where Flash is running much of the time that 3G is running too. I certainly agree with you that it's not a dealbreaker for Flash in web pages to not be backgroundable. And I'd prefer it to be the case that it's not backgrounded in the general case.