> I understand that this is the future and hate Flash as
> much as the next guy, but I just don't understand why
> we're just suddenly bashing Adobe.
I've been wondering about the recent change myself. Considering that it's not election season, it seems prudent to wonder about the sudden flood of unverifiable identities in discussion forums. Hard to tell, but necessary to wonder.
JD, I understand that you can't speak for Adobe as a whole, but in your perception, what would be the biggest obstacles to open-sourcing the Flash Player? Apart from inertia, what is the value in keeping it a proprietary product when, as has been voiced by John Nack, Adobe's stake is in the creation apps and not in the runtime?
Hi jd. I applaud your willingness to ask tough questions like 'who are these (unspecified) unverifiable identities posting (unspecified) things about Flash on (unspecified) forums who only started posting (unspecified) days ago?'. If you ask me this smacks of a sweeping anti-Adobe conspiracy, no doubt orchestrated by (malicious Apple fanboys|the Moonlight development team|those sneaky swedes).
The current outpouring of negativity over Flash is in no way a continuation of past trends and does not represent any sort of culmination of widespread customer anguish over Adobe's (perceived or real) failure to address paying and nonpaying customers' needs for a stable, performant, secure way to create interactive media.
The comparatively rapid progress of <canvas>, <video> and <audio> in the past few years versus the rest of Flash's lifespan should in no way be interpreted as a sign that people have become fed up with being dependent on a badly engineered, unreliable, overpriced piece of technology from a self-sabotaging software juggernaut.
Continuation of past trends? Flash has always been mildly despised, but ever since the announcement of the iPad, this Flash-bashing and consequent Adobe-bashing has meteorically risen. Every day now, there are multiple articles on HN and elsewhere justifying why the iPad doesn't and shouldn't run Flash.
Why can't Flash make use of Quicktime like every other multimedia app on Macs for the past decade?
Adobe has stated that the APIs aren't sufficient, but I haven't seen any of you explain what exactly you do need. If you're looking for an API to specifically feed data to a dedicated decode chip, you're doing it wrong, because hardware abstraction is the operating system's job.
If it's merely a problem of the Quicktime APIs being hard to use, then you deserve a swift bankruptcy for complaining about it publicly rather than learning how to program properly on a Mac.
The simple fact remains that Flash is so resource-hungry that it is undeniably badly written. On my machine, with a Radeon X1600 GPU that doesn't have any useful h.264 acceleration, playing a certain h.264 video with a resolution of 640x360 causes Flash 10.1 beta 2 to use on average 90% CPU, whereas Quicktime Player playing from a file uses a steady 16%. Flash is wasting three quarters of my CPU cycles on overhead. Yes, I can understand a difference of a few points due to extra layers of IPC and the networking code, but even if I'm generous, the latest-and-greatest Flash pre-release is throwing away every other clock cycle that my CPU has.
Edit: I tested the video on VLC as well, to make extra sure that there is no home-field hardware acceleration advantage for QuickTime. VLC uses about 18% CPU. Flash's software decoder is 4-5 times slower than it should be.
Then you'd have to do version-checks, if you're actually delivering content to audiences. Fewer people have it, fewer people use the current version. Most codecs on content sites are H.264 or On2 VP6 (successor to Theora). Easier to solicit Apple to open up their acceleration APIs to plugins.
<em>"The simple fact remains that Flash is so resource-hungry that it is undeniably badly written."</em>
Version checks on Mac OS X are not necessary: The system requirements for Flash 10.0 on OS X state that OS X 10.4 or later is required. Mac OS X 10.4 and later ship with QuickTime 7, which includes h.264 support. Quicktime 7 cannot be removed from the operating system. Thus, exactly everybody who can run the latest stable release of Flash for Mac already has an OS-provided h.264 decoder that has proven to be much more efficient than the one that is in Flash. Not using Quicktime on OS X is like not using DirectX 10 on Windows Vista and 7.
As to the current performance of the latest Flash beta, what is your justification for Flash requiring five times the computational resources of other video players? What is Flash doing that is not only more intensive than h.264 decoding, but four times more intensive?
<em>"It is entirely unreasonable to assume that there is any statistically significant proportion of those plugin crashes that aren't Flash"</em>
I've got a slow connection on my Mac at home, and have consistently used Flash-blockers and ad-blockers over the years to control what's pushed to me. Even so, Firefox and Safari regularly stall and require a restart. May be my Mac, though.
That's not much of a reply, much less a refutation.
The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins. Java applets et al are so rare that Flash might as well be the only plugin that is used.
Whether or not your web browser crashes when it isn't using Flash is completely off-topic, unless you are trying to insinuate that Apple can't even tell from a stack dump where the crash originated. In which case, you're taking an awfully roundabout way to calling Apple incompetent liars.
> "The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins.
Indeterminate. The logs show that Flash made a call. It didn't show where that call went when it failed. (I usually run Safari and Firefox in parallel on my Mac because both have stability problems, despite using a Flash blocker.) Most of the Player code is the same across OS, only the outer wrappers and connecting APIs differ.
On the happy side, there has recently been some increased cooperation with the Safari team, and when combined with the mobile optimizations you can expect to see some of the gains described by Kevin Lynch:
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_...
What I've heard (and I don't have access to Apple's source records) is that most of these failures are when the plugin requests more memory, and the browser responds ungracefully. Flash just triggered it but didn't cause it.
But until Apple gets out there with clear and honest executive communication, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.
(On the good side, Safari team has been permitted to communicate with the Player team, and some of these problems may be addressed. We're still seeking Apple Corps approval to decompress video off the CPU on their computers. It's their business decision to make.)
Sure. Most of the crashing doesn't occur in other forums, where people post with their real identities. It's only when Apple business models are threatened that we see all these "ray@gmail" and "acey@mailinator.com" come out.
If people were straight up, and focused on trying to solve a problem, that'd be one thing. Sudden swells of anonymous turfing is another. Apple won't even go on-the-record with their executive-level smears, for goshsakes... what kind of corporate culture is that?
Adobe has been an abusive monopoly in the streaming video market. It's only when a large company controversially decides to try to break that monopoly that people come out of the woodwork to cheer what may be the downfall of a product that truly sucks. Prior to Apple taking on Flash, it was a foregone conclusion that Flash sucks, but it was a necessary evil.
Travis keeps the sites confidential, for obvious reasons. It's plausible that there was another shift in sites sampled recently, similar to the doubling that it reported for Silverlight starting one week in November:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdowdell/4180222368/
I saw Alp's post last night... plausible, a good engineering challenge. Not sure how it will play out in the world though. But it sure added some spice to this morning's Theora-vs-H.264 wars.... ;-)
No matter how hard you try, no matter how long you try; you will never ever be able to convince the people of the internets that Flash isn't a crash prone performance hog.
People don't use Flash because they like it, they use it to view the content that requires it. It astonishes me that you don't understand this.
Like I said; no amount of effort on your part is going to make us forget our experiences with your suck ass plugin crashing our browser every day. Thankfully, there are Flash blocker plugins that make this a more rare event.
Your inability to understand this does explain why Flash is getting worse instead of better though. So thanks for that.
