6 ms·

Flash proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance

23 points by mkilling 16y ago

jamesbritt 16y ago
That's amazing. Beta software that's buggy? Unheard of.
- marketer 16y ago
  It's something more fundamental. When writing software for mobile devices, you really need to optimize for power consumption. There was a recent talk at Google IO about the new polling vs pushing for web services, and it's alarming. If your Android app polls a web service every 5 minutes, it'll use something like 10% of the battery in one day (just that one app!). Flash apps are simply not designed for optimal power consumption. Flash is designed for multimedia apps, which are generally power hogs. I develop Flash professionally, and I'd never run it on my phone.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    Well you should open your mind a little, because it's currently the only way to get video on most sites. You can turn it off for sites where you don't need it.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    Do you run games on your phone? Aren't those multimedia apps as well? But they're ok and Flash is not? Why is choice a problem here?
    - marketer 16y ago
      I'm mostly worried about Flash in the context of network usage. I can't say how the power performance is for graphics and gaming, but I'd guess it's about the same as native phone apps. It's easy to imagine flash apps with network access patterns that aren't optimized for phones. Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if left running.
      - jamesbritt 16y ago
        "Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if left running." How does this compare to some AJAX + a timer? Is it the network call itself that's an issue, or just how that is implemented in Flash?
  - ilike 16y ago
    There is an option to set Flash to "on demand" mode on mobile devices. There is so much flash content out there on the web, and being able to play flash content on-the-move, on-demand is obviously a good thing.
chrischen2 16y ago
They could make it so that it doesn't automatically load all flash on page, and only ones you activate.
- Tichy 16y ago
  It already works that way. Therefore the whole claim of ruined performance is complete bullshit.
bphogan 16y ago
Did any of you catch the comment where the guy from Adobe criticized the guy in the video for picking random sites? Seriously? So, Flash runs great on the Android as long as you only visit the sites that Adobe hand-picked for the Google IO demo? Maybe I'm reading that wrong... but that's how it sounds. Yes, it's beta. But don't hold your breath while you wait for it to improve. Flash is a big part of the web, and an expensive one too. Computers need to be fast to run today's Flash content. My netbook (windows) can't run Flash-based sites, neither can my Mac... so I don;t think we can just blame Apple for not letting Adobe optimize Flash. I don't think we need to blame anyone. The fact is that Adobe makes software that requires serious hardware to run. I am very skeptical that it will run well on low powered devices. If it does, it may only do so on "approved" sites which really isn't "choice" as far as I'm concerned.
- rbranson 16y ago
  Right on all points: Adobe's mistake isn't that they think Flash applications CAN run on these devices, as clearly this is definitely viable, but that they think Flash applications (which are designed for desktops) SHOULD run on these devices. It's a classic case of "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD."
  - benologist 16y ago
    By your argument people shouldn't even try to enable huge portions of the modern internet to run on mobile devices since most sites weren't designed for phones and it's quite fashionable to see who can load 100s of kilobytes of JavaScript for mundane purposes. Flash hasn't outlived its purpose yet, nothing has stepped forward as a complete replacement, and working to enable the whole internet is a lot better than settling for some of it.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    The experience of Flash on mobile phones is currently better than the experience of the web on smartphones from just a few years ago. Progress will continue to be made.
- papachito 16y ago
anticitizen 16y ago
You're able to disable Flash on Android by default and only load it on a site when you approve it. It doesn't 'ruin' anything at all, because you'll never be using it unless there's Flash content you want to view. Having content on the web that's unviewable to a device does more to ruin the experience than a performance hit while doing something CPU-intensive. Also, from what I've read, this beta of Flash doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration, while the final release will.
- abronte 16y ago
  Not to mention you have to download the flash player from the market if you wish to play flash (at least I did when i updated my nexus one), so it doesn't even come on the device by default as far as I know.
barrkel 16y ago
Flash is useful for video everywhere but Youtube. And it works. But for ads etc., it's best turned off. Android is better and more useful for having Flash than not. But plugin support in the browser should be made on-demand, or turned on and off as desired.
- Tichy 16y ago
  It is. You can select to run plugins only on demand, which naturally is the only sensible way to run flash. This whole "claim" is completely silly. Even on the desktop (ie OS X) the web becomes unusable with Flash enabled all the time. There are plugins like NoFlash that make it acceptable, and the occasional interesting Flash app makes it worthwhile.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    I misspoke - I know, I have flash on my Nexus One running Froyo.
- tlrobinson 16y ago
  YouTube... or Vimeo, Veoh, College Humor, DailyMotion, CNN, Reuters, NYT, ESPN, NPR, TED, WSJ, ABC, CBS, Fox, and many other sites that support HTML5 video (see http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/ http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/ for the iPhone/iPad compatible ones) The only site I personally miss is Hulu, which I hear doesn't work on Android's Flash player anyway.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    Those are almost all US conglomerates, and FWIW I don't watch any of them. BBC, on the other hand, does work on it.
buster 16y ago
Oh my god.. not that video again! Sorry, but this is the most unprofessional comparison i have ever seen. First, out of three mobiles only one supports flash and that one loads a site 1 sec slower? Second, Ads are served from different servers and it's quite common that ads are served slow.. i have browsed the mainpage with a whopping 3 flash ads and waited like 5 seconds for the flash ads to be displayed after the whole rest of the page was there.. on my desktop! Third, 3 devices in a speedtest fighting over one wifi connection on the same channel for bandwidth? Really? Please, for the sake of god, if you do comparisons and benchmarks, do them right! That the whole web is linking this video is awful. My personal experience with flash: One site gave browser crashes (flashgames). The rest of the world played nicely so far, with good performance, surprisingly good, actually. And for a beta release, i hope this one site will play on release. Again.. please don't do this. Worst. Benchmark. EVER.
- buster 16y ago
  edit: pocketnow.com copied locally, served form local network, one device at a time, stopwatch. It's not that hard... If you ignore the fact that you are comparing browsers without flash to browsers with flash.. that's stupid. He should've added lynx to it.
  - rayval 16y ago
    Agree. This is a case of, um, Apples versus Oranges. One can turn off JPEGs in a browser and have the page load faster than a browser that loads images. But that does not merit writing an article entitled "JPEGs proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance".
thought_alarm 16y ago
Watched it on my iPad. What's not mentioned is how extremely well the iPhone and iPad handle embedded HTML5 video; smooth scrolling and zooming, plus hardware decoding. If Google had also decided to only support HTML5 video that would only accelerate what is already rather quick adoption of that standard, and everybody would win. Instead they're relying on Adobe to deliver Android's video, and the results are predicably bad. But it's a bullet point they can add to their new anti-Apple marketing strategy, and I guess that's more important than the actual quality of the software they ship.
jrockway 16y ago
So loading all of the website is slower than loading only random parts? Really? I would never have guessed that...
yason 16y ago
Wasn't this expected? Scrolling pages even on my desktop browser got much snappier after enabling FlashBlock or equivalent.
Mgreen 16y ago
The video only proves that loading additional content takes additional time. Turn off the images, and the loading will be even faster. Turn off javascript and performance will be even better! News? Being able to play web games on mobile, is really a cool thing. Turn on the 'on-demand' mode and Flash wont load/play content by default.Compared to how poorly iphone handles even basic javascript effects, the flash experience on Android is excellent.

23 points by mkilling 16y ago

jamesbritt 16y ago

That's amazing. Beta software that's buggy? Unheard of.

marketer 16y ago
It's something more fundamental. When writing software for mobile devices, you really need to optimize for power consumption. There was a recent talk at Google IO about the new polling vs pushing for web services, and it's alarming. If your Android app polls a web service every 5 minutes, it'll use something like 10% of the battery in one day (just that one app!). Flash apps are simply not designed for optimal power consumption. Flash is designed for multimedia apps, which are generally power hogs. I develop Flash professionally, and I'd never run it on my phone.
- barrkel 16y ago
  Well you should open your mind a little, because it's currently the only way to get video on most sites. You can turn it off for sites where you don't need it.
- wvenable 16y ago
  Do you run games on your phone? Aren't those multimedia apps as well? But they're ok and Flash is not? Why is choice a problem here?
  - marketer 16y ago
    I'm mostly worried about Flash in the context of network usage. I can't say how the power performance is for graphics and gaming, but I'd guess it's about the same as native phone apps. It's easy to imagine flash apps with network access patterns that aren't optimized for phones. Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if left running.
    - jamesbritt 16y ago
      "Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if left running." How does this compare to some AJAX + a timer? Is it the network call itself that's an issue, or just how that is implemented in Flash?
- ilike 16y ago
  There is an option to set Flash to "on demand" mode on mobile devices. There is so much flash content out there on the web, and being able to play flash content on-the-move, on-demand is obviously a good thing.

chrischen2 16y ago

They could make it so that it doesn't automatically load all flash on page, and only ones you activate.

Tichy 16y ago
It already works that way. Therefore the whole claim of ruined performance is complete bullshit.

bphogan 16y ago

Did any of you catch the comment where the guy from Adobe criticized the guy in the video for picking random sites? Seriously? So, Flash runs great on the Android as long as you only visit the sites that Adobe hand-picked for the Google IO demo? Maybe I'm reading that wrong... but that's how it sounds. Yes, it's beta. But don't hold your breath while you wait for it to improve. Flash is a big part of the web, and an expensive one too. Computers need to be fast to run today's Flash content. My netbook (windows) can't run Flash-based sites, neither can my Mac... so I don;t think we can just blame Apple for not letting Adobe optimize Flash. I don't think we need to blame anyone. The fact is that Adobe makes software that requires serious hardware to run. I am very skeptical that it will run well on low powered devices. If it does, it may only do so on "approved" sites which really isn't "choice" as far as I'm concerned.

rbranson 16y ago
Right on all points: Adobe's mistake isn't that they think Flash applications CAN run on these devices, as clearly this is definitely viable, but that they think Flash applications (which are designed for desktops) SHOULD run on these devices. It's a classic case of "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD."
- benologist 16y ago
  By your argument people shouldn't even try to enable huge portions of the modern internet to run on mobile devices since most sites weren't designed for phones and it's quite fashionable to see who can load 100s of kilobytes of JavaScript for mundane purposes. Flash hasn't outlived its purpose yet, nothing has stepped forward as a complete replacement, and working to enable the whole internet is a lot better than settling for some of it.
- wvenable 16y ago
  The experience of Flash on mobile phones is currently better than the experience of the web on smartphones from just a few years ago. Progress will continue to be made.
papachito 16y ago

anticitizen 16y ago

You're able to disable Flash on Android by default and only load it on a site when you approve it. It doesn't 'ruin' anything at all, because you'll never be using it unless there's Flash content you want to view. Having content on the web that's unviewable to a device does more to ruin the experience than a performance hit while doing something CPU-intensive. Also, from what I've read, this beta of Flash doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration, while the final release will.

abronte 16y ago
Not to mention you have to download the flash player from the market if you wish to play flash (at least I did when i updated my nexus one), so it doesn't even come on the device by default as far as I know.

barrkel 16y ago

Flash is useful for video everywhere but Youtube. And it works. But for ads etc., it's best turned off. Android is better and more useful for having Flash than not. But plugin support in the browser should be made on-demand, or turned on and off as desired.

Tichy 16y ago
It is. You can select to run plugins only on demand, which naturally is the only sensible way to run flash. This whole "claim" is completely silly. Even on the desktop (ie OS X) the web becomes unusable with Flash enabled all the time. There are plugins like NoFlash that make it acceptable, and the occasional interesting Flash app makes it worthwhile.
- barrkel 16y ago
  I misspoke - I know, I have flash on my Nexus One running Froyo.
tlrobinson 16y ago
YouTube... or Vimeo, Veoh, College Humor, DailyMotion, CNN, Reuters, NYT, ESPN, NPR, TED, WSJ, ABC, CBS, Fox, and many other sites that support HTML5 video (see http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/ http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/ for the iPhone/iPad compatible ones) The only site I personally miss is Hulu, which I hear doesn't work on Android's Flash player anyway.
- barrkel 16y ago
  Those are almost all US conglomerates, and FWIW I don't watch any of them. BBC, on the other hand, does work on it.

buster 16y ago

Oh my god.. not that video again! Sorry, but this is the most unprofessional comparison i have ever seen. First, out of three mobiles only one supports flash and that one loads a site 1 sec slower? Second, Ads are served from different servers and it's quite common that ads are served slow.. i have browsed the mainpage with a whopping 3 flash ads and waited like 5 seconds for the flash ads to be displayed after the whole rest of the page was there.. on my desktop! Third, 3 devices in a speedtest fighting over one wifi connection on the same channel for bandwidth? Really? Please, for the sake of god, if you do comparisons and benchmarks, do them right! That the whole web is linking this video is awful. My personal experience with flash: One site gave browser crashes (flashgames). The rest of the world played nicely so far, with good performance, surprisingly good, actually. And for a beta release, i hope this one site will play on release. Again.. please don't do this. Worst. Benchmark. EVER.

buster 16y ago
edit: pocketnow.com copied locally, served form local network, one device at a time, stopwatch. It's not that hard... If you ignore the fact that you are comparing browsers without flash to browsers with flash.. that's stupid. He should've added lynx to it.
- rayval 16y ago
  Agree. This is a case of, um, Apples versus Oranges. One can turn off JPEGs in a browser and have the page load faster than a browser that loads images. But that does not merit writing an article entitled "JPEGs proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance".

thought_alarm 16y ago

Watched it on my iPad. What's not mentioned is how extremely well the iPhone and iPad handle embedded HTML5 video; smooth scrolling and zooming, plus hardware decoding. If Google had also decided to only support HTML5 video that would only accelerate what is already rather quick adoption of that standard, and everybody would win. Instead they're relying on Adobe to deliver Android's video, and the results are predicably bad. But it's a bullet point they can add to their new anti-Apple marketing strategy, and I guess that's more important than the actual quality of the software they ship.

jrockway 16y ago

So loading all of the website is slower than loading only random parts? Really? I would never have guessed that...

yason 16y ago

Wasn't this expected? Scrolling pages even on my desktop browser got much snappier after enabling FlashBlock or equivalent.

Mgreen 16y ago

The video only proves that loading additional content takes additional time. Turn off the images, and the loading will be even faster. Turn off javascript and performance will be even better! News? Being able to play web games on mobile, is really a cool thing. Turn on the 'on-demand' mode and Flash wont load/play content by default.Compared to how poorly iphone handles even basic javascript effects, the flash experience on Android is excellent.