For 90% of the sites that I visit, I would prefer no flash. Not to mention the battery, last thing I want is flash chewing through my battery for flash that I dont even want to see. I wouldnt mind the ability to click on a flash movie that isnt youtube, and have it launch a player.
<sarcasm>
- I guess since it's on the Internet it must be true.
- All the other smartphones which have Flash must have 30 min battery life.
- Apple is saint and Adobe is evil.
- iPhone is such an open platform.
</sarcasm>
Apple won't let Adobe make a decent Flash plugin for OS X. Apple restricts APIs that the plugin needs to run well--things like access to hardware video acceleration.
A lot of people at Adobe use Macs. A lot of people at Adobe work on Flash player. They don't just sit around screwing off all day; Flash on OS X is lousy but there isn't much they can do about it.
I don't know why Apple does it. Stability? Stubbornness? You're right though. If Apple won't let Flash player work well on OS X, they sure as hell aren't going to let it run on iPhone.
With actual GPU-accelerated H.264 decoding I’m guessing those CPU utilization numbers could drop to a remotely reasonable value. But it’s up to Apple to expose the appropriate hooks to allow Adobe to (eventually) enable that functionality.
Linus won't let Adobe make a decent Flash plugin for Linux. Linus restricts APIs that the plugin needs to run well--things like access to hardware video acceleration.
What Adobe probably means by "restricting tech" is that Apple does not allow alternative code interpreters on their device, as to not facilitate AppStore circumvention.
In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. 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. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.
Mhm. "We don't want your OpenGL/DirectX, we will interface directly with your video adapter, crashing your OS. We're just that sort of a lovely bunch of hardcore uni-core supporters."
> I think Xbench, which hasn't been updated in years, is a solid benchmark for that old program that you depend on but has been long abandoned or at least ignored by its developer.
Yes it would probably be safe to assume that 30mins is a little bit of an exaggeration. It doesnt make it any less true that most flash content are ads, and i dont want ads draining my battery even a little.
Agreed, this "story" smells fishy. How is it that flash works acceptably on other platforms but not the iPhone?
A much more likely explanation is the one everyone has been assuming, viz., Apple doesn't want any code they haven't approved running on the phone, period.
Flash doesn't run "acceptably" on OSX or Linux. It uses around 30% of my cpu on either platform, compared to using only 3% of the cpu on my windows machine. Clearly they have some work to do before they can make flash as efficient as running on their core platform.
Adobe should make flash work decently on other platforms before making one for the iphone...
Running any flash app on my macbook causes the fan to turn on within 5 minutes -- it's horrible.
If that's true, why doesn't Apple make their own swf viewer? I mean, they're Apple, they have twenty billion dollars in the bank; they can afford to reimplement Flash Player.
My macbook goes absolutely nuts when I watch even a 2 minute flash video -- CPU usage spikes to close to 100% as the fans try to compensate by ramping up to a speed that makes watching the presentation without headphones unbearable. Adobe definitely has a lot of work to do on Flash on OSX :(
I saw sometime ago a video that a guy opened up a flash video on the os x and then the same on a virtual machine, running windows, on top of os x. The cpu use on the latter was negligible.
I don't know what you have running on your Macbook, but I have two Macbooks, one new and one about 2 years old, and my kids watch hours of Flash videos and Flash games until I have to wrestle the computer out of their hands because it is bedtime.
This "30 minute battery life" smells fishy. It is a friend of friend of a friend who woke up one day in his hotel room with his kidney removed and his iPhone battery drained.
and watched the resource use. While the video was playing, the minimum CPU use from Safari was 48%, with frequent spikes above 60%. As soon as I closed the tab, CPU use dropped to about 2% and stayed there. On a laptop with a full charge and power-management profiles to optimize usage you can get away with this; on a power-constrained mobile device you most certainly can't.
Same experience here, although I wouldn't laud flash's performance on Windows either. Silverlight runs better than flash most of the time, and Silverlight is pretty terrible.
Compared to what? Silverlight uses a bit more CPU time when playing MP4 videos compared to Media Player or VLC but about the same as Google Chrome. It may be different on OS X. How does Silverlight's video performance on OS X compare to native Quicktime for example (which is relatively slow on Windows)?
Performance is much improved on Linux these days (at least the x64 version).
My Macbook Pro running Ubuntu 9.10 uses about 5-10% CPU at most for flash video, and usually a little less for flash-only sites. The only problem is that when it crashes the browser is sans-flash until you restart it.
On my machine, it likes to kill my whole webbrowser whenever I use the Youtube quicklist too many times. Then I can't relaunch the browser because it doesn't actually kill the browser cleanly; it's zombied. A few kill-9s later, and I can finally watch a cat flushing a toilet.
Well since the iPhone platform is similar to Apple's desktop platform, if I were Apple, before I went ahead and made concessions to Adobe I'd want to see some proof that they wouldn't mess up the user experience. So far Adobe has shown they aren't either willing or able to write quality Unix flash players.
Wow, I'm being downvoted into oblivion for observing that other mobile devices can run flash apps and pointing out that Apple keeps tight control over their platform. Neither of these are particularly controversial, as I see it.
I realize that Flash is annoying, and of course I'd expect to be able to turn it off on any reasonable platform---most of the time, I really don't want it. But when I do, let me make a big-boy decision about battery life versus usefulness all by myself.
Are you really under the impression that Apple is in a better position to decide whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile than I am? On my phone?
> Are you really under the impression that Apple is in a better position to decide whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile than I am? On my phone?
Yes, I am under that impression. If Apple shipped with Flash, people would constantly complain about the battery life of the phone. I have been working on user interfaces for a couple of years now, and I can tell you that my user interface code is constantly at fault. Every segfault, random pause, incorrect data, data corruption, missing file, and plugin bug gets filed under "user interface" by anyone who is not directly part of the project.
Now, its possible that you're the guy who would spend a week testing battery life under various conditions to determine that Flash was at fault. Maybe you would publish all of this to your blog, and 1,000 people would read it and agree. Even if these were both true, the other 21 million iPhone users would be bitching about battery life all day long - and they would not care that Flash is at fault - and they certainly would not be able to live without it now that they spend 29 of their 30 minutes of battery life in FarmVille.
Apple has no control over Flash, and Flash sucks on every platform except maybe Windows. If Flash really mattered, one of the other smartphones would support it and make the iPhone obsolete. This is what competition is for. What we need is more diversity and interoperability in this industry. Flash on every device is not diversity.
And Apple's walled garden does nothing to promote either diversity or interoperability.
Separate your dislike of Flash from your reasoning on this subject for just a moment. What if it were Sun wanting to deploy a JVM for the iPhone? How about a .NET CLR? These certainly promote both interoperability and diversity.
Now, would Apple allow them? Why not? Because they'd impact battery life? Hardly. They'd disallow them because it would loosen their grip on the iPhone software ecosystem. The bottom line is, Apple's business model with respect to the App Store relies on being the only game in town.
Downvote away. No matter that I'm on topic and making reasonable, if contentious, points. My karma isn't so important to me that I'll let y'all's fanboiism gets in the way of actual discussion.
I never downvoted your comments, and do not I think that my points are fanboyism.
> And Apple's walled garden does nothing to promote either diversity or interoperability.
I want diversity of full device stacks. Many competing operating systems. Microsoft's business plan and the previously high cost of computers has convinced people that hardware and software are separate things. Apple's take is that they are not - they come together to form one device. Apple produces devices that while internally sealed, interoperate with well understood file formats like HTML, Doc, PDF, and MP3/AAC. This is better for the consumer, who honestly shouldn't care how these complicated systems work.
> What if it were Sun wanting to deploy a JVM for the iPhone?
Well thats great, they can, just like Adobe can release Flash for the iPhone [ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ ]. The issue at hand is whether MobileSafari has a Flash plugin. I personally do not care for one, and Adobe hasn't gone the extra mile to make it compelling.
> The bottom line is, Apple's business model with respect to the App Store relies on being the only game in town.
Silly, unsubstantiated remarks aren't as interesting as they sound in your dorm room. Apple doesn't need to make any money at all from the AppStore, they're sitting on a $40b pile of gold. From what I can see, they're trying to make a great product, and everyone else who failed to do so on their own wants a piece.
Silly, unsubstantiated remarks aren't as interesting as they sound in your dorm room.
Snarky, wildly inaccurate drivel doesn't lend you any much-needed credibility. If you're unaware of Apple's obsession with lock-in, I'm impressed you can get an internet connection from whatever planet you live on.
Apple doesn't need to make any money at all from the AppStore
Oh really? They just take a 30% cut because they're kind-hearted? True, it's not a huge chunk of their revenue, but it's a very high margin business and you can be damn sure they will fight to grow it as much as possible.
Moreover, your comment about a "pile of gold" is naive. Most companies in the tech sector, Apple included, are expected by investors to maintain a "growth" attitude. If you don't believe me, look at the incidence of dividend payments in high-tech companies versus the market as a whole. Sitting on a huge pile of gold does little to nothing for your stock price[1]; investors want to see up-and-to-the-right. This is a simple, if unfortunate, fact: Apple is on the prowl for every new revenue stream they can find, especially those that print margin dollars, because they must always appear to be a growth company, even though you and I know this is a noble lie at best.
[1] other than establish the "ground floor" valuation for your stock; point is, it does relatively little to drive investment when, by comparison, your peers are shoveling their cash hordes into idiotic buybacks and low-return R&D just to keep the illusion that they're taking over the world. I have substantial experience with this phenomenon at the company I work for.
I believe the only mobile version of Flash for ARM available today is Flash Lite which is based on Flash 7. Is that really useful at all? Seems like Flash 9 is a requirement for almost every thing these days. IIRC Flash Lite isn't even a full implementation of Flash 7. I've never used it myself so I could be wrong. I don't see how useful that would actually be. When Adobe actually ships a modern mobile ARM version of Flash the issue becomes more relevant. I'm not really too keen on Flash in general so I don't mind Apple playing some politics with the iPhone to promote open web standards over proprietary Flash that has historically been an incompatible slow moving mess on just about every non-Windows platform.
While it is useful for web apps, JavaScript in Mobile Safari is not sufficient for creating the vast majority of standalone applications.
Flash, while hardly a world-class systems programming language, is a step beyond JavaScript in several respects.
Most importantly, it is more consistently cross-platform compatible, meaning that I could actually take advantage of preexisting Flash applets on the iPhone, whereas oftimes when designing a JS app one must consider a far wider range of discrepancies between platforms. In other words, given a randomly-selected JS applet and a randomly-selected Flash applet from all available to me, the probability is greater that the Flash applet will be correct in an officially-supported Flash VM than that the JS applet will be correct in Mobile Safari.
Show me an instance of a modern browser running javascript that doesn't run correctly. I've written a lot of javascript and the only thing that trips me up is the css. Javascript itself works fine on almost all platforms. (Some quirkiness on IE6).
No offense, but something you read on Reddit that some random dude heard from "a good friend" is probably complete bullshit.
Nonetheless, it's still totally believable. But it probably represents almost no optimization on their end. If I can play a 3d multiplayer game over 3G for an hour without the phone crapping out, a think some vector graphics are surmountable. There just has to be a desire there. And clearly Apple doesn't desire to be supporting a proprietary standard when HTML5 does the same thing in a completely open way.
Now, we just need a Flash (the big desktop creation app) equivalent that spits out HTML5 code. Anyone working on that?
Some of the most intensive games out there are using about 100% of the iPhones power and still get several hours of battery life. Even if the app used some pathological combination of CPU/GPU/Disk/Network resources you wouldn't get it down to 30 minutes,
How do you know it uses 100%? If it has smooth animation, it most probably doesn't. It's easy to check if you're really interested - just run a typical busy loop in your app and measure the time until it the battery runs out.
By running Instruments and profiling them. Even if I didn't it's pretty easy to spot games that are maxing out the iPhone - dropped frames, slowdown, animation glitches,
> Now, we just need a Flash (the big desktop creation app) equivalent that spits out HTML5 code. Anyone working on that?
I was just discussing this exact idea with a friend yesterday (although it's something I personally wouldn't be interested in). If done correctly, you could backend to HTML5+JS+CSS and still emit SWF for legacy support. Would certainly be interesting.
There's no need to create a player; as far as the creator goes, Adobe's already released the free mxlmlc so you could simply generate ActionScript and let them compile it.
I have a Nokia N800, in terms of hardware is half the performance of the iPhone, and flash runs fine and I've never measured battery life, but seemed fine to me. I have to question the validity of this. Anybody else have the n800 or even the n700
Come on, the real reason flash "can't perform" is because it would open up a competing app delivery vector that would undermine the app store. One with no approval power.
I call bullshit on these conspiracy theories that Apple is blocking Flash because it would compete with the app store. You can make apps in JS that will run in Mobile Safari. Is that a "competing app delivery vector"? If so, then why would Apple allow it, if it's so worried about hanging on to it's app store business?
I find it a little dubious that Flash would even be competition for the app store. The whole reason the app store and the iTunes store are so successful is because it's incredibly easy and, much to the chagrin of some people on here, centralized. Joe Schmoe can easily download and install a new app on his shiny new iPhone pretty easily with the app store. He knows where to go for new apps. That won't necessarily be the case with Flash.
I bet there's more to the story than performance issues, but I'd imagine it has more to do with Adobe producing a crappy product than it does with any of this nonsense. Apple thrives on the user experience being good, end-to-end, and I'd imagine they'll outright reject anything that sullies that.
I don't think it's a matter of comspiracy, but rather of control. It's seen in their app store approval process and it's key to their product's success. Why leave important aspects of a product's perception (3rd Party Software), up to chance and also make money through that control? Sounds like a good way to make a profit.
How would that be different from HTML5 web apps? (besides being slower, larger to download, uglier, more proprietary, less accessible and more CPU intensive)
