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I've done a lot of Flash hacking while at justin.tv and I have to say, while it has its bugs, the Flash virtual machine is an under-appreciated piece of technol

I've done a lot of Flash hacking while at justin.tv and I have to say, while it has its bugs, the Flash virtual machine is an under-appreciated piece of technology. It can be incredibly fast, in the right hands. I believe the people calling for its demise are actually calling for an end to sloppy programming by bad coders who work for ad agencies. If Flash ever actually dies, and gets replaced by "HTML5", people are going to be sorely disappointed when those very same bad coders simply start writing exactly the same sloppy code in javascript.

msbarnett 16y ago
To a certain extent, I agree; sloppily written Flash software is a huge part of the problem. But Adobe isn't doing itself any favours either. Once every day or two the fans on my laptop ramp up for apparently no reason -- and a quick trip into the process monitor invariably reveals that the Flash plugin process has gone rampant and is eating 100% of my CPU, long after I've left the site that was using it. It's excruciating to wait for Adobe to fix these long-standing issues, as they seem to feel no real urgency to improve the performance and stability of the plugin. "HTML5" as a group of technologies to replace Flash will no doubt see its share of terribly written uses, but at least the Firefox, Chrome, Safari et al teams can compete to write the most-efficient, least buggy runtimes for those crappy sites to run on.
- abstractbill 16y ago
  You're vastly underestimating the ability of a poor programmer to bring your computer to its knees ;) A tight infinite loop running on any virtual machine will have the same effect.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    That's why Javascript interpreters have, blessedly, implemented "Unresponsive Script" warnings that let you kill off those scripts. Sadly, Adobe hasn't seen fit to offer comparable functionality for dealing with a Flash application that goes berserk. But again, I think that comes down to browsers being in strong competition creating a lot of incentive for them to work hard on efficiency and UX, where Adobe is content to let usability stagnate and bugs fester.
    - justsee 16y ago
      Flash has had 'Unresponsive Script' warnings as long as I can remember, maybe since 2000?
      - earl 16y ago
        I've never seen one, and I use a mac.
      - msbarnett 16y ago
        Interesting, thanks. Like earl, I've never seen one on OS X.
    - seanalltogether 16y ago
      Unresponsive script is different then slow script, flash offers the same unresponsive script warning when a thread gets caught in an infinite loop, and neither environment knows how to deal with a slow script.
      - sans-serif 16y ago
        Yeah, can somebody tell me how can this be so hard to do?
        rosser 16y ago
        Because it's more or less an instance of the halting problem?
      - rimantas 16y ago
        Unresponsive script is different then slow script Well… Browsers use the same thread for UI updates and JS execution, so every time[1] Javascript is executing your UI is blocked—which means that if your script runs for longer than ~0.2s UI becomes noticeably unresponsive. So IE will decide that your script is unresponsive after 5mil statements, Firefox—after 10 seconds, and Safari after 5. Opera seems not to care [1] Unless your are using webworkers. Those are executed in separate threads.
xuhu 16y ago
Here's a comparison of playing 720p video using Flash versus Mplayer: http://imgur.com/fq5c1 http://imgur.com/fq5c1 Mplayer is roughly twice as fast, and both are using libavcodec for decoding H264.
loewenskind 16y ago
I just want Flash to go away because I find it silly that such a huge portion of the web experience is provided by one company instead of a standard like the rest of it.

msbarnett 16y ago

To a certain extent, I agree; sloppily written Flash software is a huge part of the problem. But Adobe isn't doing itself any favours either. Once every day or two the fans on my laptop ramp up for apparently no reason -- and a quick trip into the process monitor invariably reveals that the Flash plugin process has gone rampant and is eating 100% of my CPU, long after I've left the site that was using it. It's excruciating to wait for Adobe to fix these long-standing issues, as they seem to feel no real urgency to improve the performance and stability of the plugin. "HTML5" as a group of technologies to replace Flash will no doubt see its share of terribly written uses, but at least the Firefox, Chrome, Safari et al teams can compete to write the most-efficient, least buggy runtimes for those crappy sites to run on.

abstractbill 16y ago
You're vastly underestimating the ability of a poor programmer to bring your computer to its knees ;) A tight infinite loop running on any virtual machine will have the same effect.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  That's why Javascript interpreters have, blessedly, implemented "Unresponsive Script" warnings that let you kill off those scripts. Sadly, Adobe hasn't seen fit to offer comparable functionality for dealing with a Flash application that goes berserk. But again, I think that comes down to browsers being in strong competition creating a lot of incentive for them to work hard on efficiency and UX, where Adobe is content to let usability stagnate and bugs fester.
  - justsee 16y ago
    Flash has had 'Unresponsive Script' warnings as long as I can remember, maybe since 2000?
    - earl 16y ago
      I've never seen one, and I use a mac.
    - msbarnett 16y ago
      Interesting, thanks. Like earl, I've never seen one on OS X.
  - seanalltogether 16y ago
    Unresponsive script is different then slow script, flash offers the same unresponsive script warning when a thread gets caught in an infinite loop, and neither environment knows how to deal with a slow script.
    - sans-serif 16y ago
      Yeah, can somebody tell me how can this be so hard to do?
      - rosser 16y ago
        Because it's more or less an instance of the halting problem?
    - rimantas 16y ago
      Unresponsive script is different then slow script Well… Browsers use the same thread for UI updates and JS execution, so every time[1] Javascript is executing your UI is blocked—which means that if your script runs for longer than ~0.2s UI becomes noticeably unresponsive. So IE will decide that your script is unresponsive after 5mil statements, Firefox—after 10 seconds, and Safari after 5. Opera seems not to care [1] Unless your are using webworkers. Those are executed in separate threads.

xuhu 16y ago

Here's a comparison of playing 720p video using Flash versus Mplayer: http://imgur.com/fq5c1 http://imgur.com/fq5c1 Mplayer is roughly twice as fast, and both are using libavcodec for decoding H264.

loewenskind 16y ago

I just want Flash to go away because I find it silly that such a huge portion of the web experience is provided by one company instead of a standard like the rest of it.