iPad Why Flash Is Fundamentally Flawed On Touchscreen Devices

[vaughnmr]

Actually CS3 did have an update, 10.0.1. And I've used Adobe customer service, with a graphic problem I had with tif images from a scanner, and they responded the next day by email. Pretty fast, I thought, and they nailed the problem.

A lot of things you complain could be applied to a lot of companies, including Apple.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by danegeld

I base it on nearly 20 years of daily use of Adobe products. There have been no bug-fix updates to Illustrator CS4. There's been one minor update to Photoshop CS4 and that didn't fix much. There were never any updates to Photoshop CS3. When was the last time you tried to get any customer service from Adobe?

Hm, you may want to check the Adobe support pages, before making some of the above statements.... Then you may have found this Photoshop CS3 update As well as 3 updates for Illustrator CS3 (2 English ones).

Again, I don't understand these all-out attacks on Adobe, because Apple' iPad cannot properly display widely used web pages.

Adobe makes generally good products, useful to a range of industries, and superior to the competition, including Apple's pretty lame Pro apps (some of which are hardly "pro" in any meaningful way).

Originally Posted by fugazied

Flash is shocking on the CPU.
The basic problems of Flash CPU draining the battery and crashing the OS are what kept it off the iPad. If you look at the capabilities of the iPad and what publishers have already done (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/...demonstration/) it doesn't 'need' flash for anything.

Also most OS X crashes are from flash crashing a web browser. One of the reasons Jobs hates it.

This is hardly true.

Flash runs perfectly fine on the vast majority of people's Macs. While it can be CPU intensive, so is displaying H.264 video, and both are handled fine by modern Macs.

On other platforms, including Windows and Android, the new version of Flash uses hardware acceleration, making possible true HD experience on low powered devices.

If one is so concerned about CPU usage, they should dump Safari, which is the biggest CPU and memory hog on both Macs and Windows, compared to other browsers, including Firefox and Chrome (and IE8). Plus, most crashes in Safari are due to Java issues, not Flash.

As to repeating Job's mantra that Flash is bad for battery life and CPU, so is playing a H.264 video. And if it was such a problem, perhaps working with Adobe the way MS and Google do, and providing needed information, would have solved whatever issues there are. If there can be hardware acceleration for Flash in the new Androids, why cannot the same be true for the iPhone/iPad, which is largely based on similar hardware?

Ah, but the real reason is, that Flash bypasses Job's idea of a "walled garden" and will likely put a dent in the estimated quarter of a billion Apple made from the Apps store last year. And hey, if I can watch Hulu on my iPad for free, why would I pay Apple to see the same stuff?

Finally, you did notice that the Wired presentation was build entirely by using Adobe products, right? It's an AIR app, which is basically Flash.

Then it can be converted to run on the iPad, but on other platforms, such as Android, it will run native. Which kind of makes platforms which support AIR and Flash much better for this kind of thing....

[jibril]

Before we all get googly eyed with flash love, lets also remember it's usually one of the biggest vectors for security attacks today, as well.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by jibril

Before we all get googly eyed with flash love, lets also remember it's usually one of the biggest vectors for security attacks today, as well.

This is not true, to my knowledge.

Where did you get the data for such statement? Or are you just repeating the statements Jobs made to deflect attention from the glaring shortcomings of the iPad?

On the Mac side, the biggest infection vector is QuickTime. See, for example The Top Cyber Security Risks.

Java can also often be a greater security threat than Flash.

And it doesn't help that Apple is generally lax and slow at patching security issues at the OS level (see, for example, Mac OS X Java fiasco: Apple still doesn't get security).

[Dylrob]

Hmm, in retrospect RIM's "SureTouch"technology might actually prove to be more than a gimmick if and when flash is eventually ported to the Storm.

Then again it seems like multi-touch could solve this limitation easily.

[jibril]

Originally Posted by Sonist

This is not true, to my knowledge.

Where did you get the data for such statement? Or are you just repeating the statements Jobs made to deflect attention from the glaring shortcomings of the iPad?

Oh no, just from reading /., not anything that Steve Jobs says since I don't pay attention to him.

On the Mac side, the biggest infection vector is QuickTime.

QT is a piece of junk.

VLC ftw!

[Krystian Galaj]

QT is a piece of junk for a programmer, because if you try to do anything in it from more than one thread at the same, or try to do anything important from thread other than main thread, it just crashes. A dinosaur from the 90s...

[Sonist]

Here is an interesting article, testing HTML5 and Flash 10/10.1 on various browsers, on both Mac and Windows:

Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests

"...
Mac Tests

* With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%
* With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)
* With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome

Windows Tests

* Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU
* Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.
* On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0
* In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU
...
Will Apple budge? At this point, it's unlikely. In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it's simply not an efficient technology...and that's true for now, considering how it's set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?

So while Flash's "CPU hogging" may be a contributing factor in Apple's decision to not support the technology on their mobile devices, that's probably not the only reason behind the block...."

For what it's worth, from a practical standpoint, I can't tell much difference in real world conditions, and neither should most users with relatively current computers.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Here is an interesting article, testing HTML5 and Flash 10/10.1 on various browsers, on both Mac and Windows:

Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests

"...
Mac Tests

* With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%
* With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)
* With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome

Windows Tests

* Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU
* Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.
* On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0
* In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU
...
Will Apple budge? At this point, it's unlikely. In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it's simply not an efficient technology...and that's true for now, considering how it's set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?

So while Flash's "CPU hogging" may be a contributing factor in Apple's decision to not support the technology on their mobile devices, that's probably not the only reason behind the block...."

For what it's worth, from a practical standpoint, I can't tell much difference in real world conditions, and neither should most users with relatively current computers.

The numbers are interesting but say not much about what performance would be on iPad/iPhone. Would be nice to see some numbers for other mobile devices.

Seems Adobe still has some work to tune up Flash on OS X. Or maybe the plugin architecture of Safari/Chrome/Firefox there is inherently hostile...

Would also be interesting to get some numbers for other multimedia plugins.

And of course there's probably a lot of variance with these numbers depending on how well endowed a particular system is.

[conniewilson11]

Originally Posted by tomsem

The numbers are interesting but say not much about what performance would be on iPad/iPhone. Would be nice to see some numbers for other mobile devices.

Seems Adobe still has some work to tune up Flash on OS X. Or maybe the plugin architecture of Safari/Chrome/Firefox there is inherently hostile...

Would also be interesting to get some numbers for other multimedia plugins.

And of course there's probably a lot of variance with these numbers depending on how well endowed a particular system is.

yeah, numbers will tell.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by tomsem

The numbers are interesting but say not much about what performance would be on iPad/iPhone. ...

Heh, for the foreseeable future nobody will know, since Apple will not allow Flash on the iPhone/iPad.

Flash 10.1+ has/will have hardware acceleration on Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, WebOS and by 2011, Windows Phone 7, which resolves any battery and performance issues.

Originally Posted by tomsem

Seems Adobe still has some work to tune up Flash on OS X. Or maybe the plugin architecture of Safari/Chrome/Firefox there is inherently hostile...
...

Nope. I'll quote from the original article I referenced: "Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs." So, Flash will be slower on Macs than on Windows, because Apple refuses to cooperate with Adobe the way MS and Google do (not that on any modern Mac I have I notice any Flash issues).

Here is Gizmodo's take: HTML5 vs. Flash: The Video Benchmark Deathmatch

[sharilewis]

I happen to think he's talking out of his rear.

It seems he is trying to disprove the existence of my old N800 which as a touch screen device works fine with plenty of flash sites. Sure there are probably things which won't work but most of the large sites people are interested in and sites using flash as menus and media players will work fine.

There are plenty of other devices too which seem to cope with flash and a touch screen.

<LINK MODERATED>

[Fat Abe]

Between the claims and counterclaims, one wonders, where's the proof? Jobs claims Flash crashes OS X Snow Leopard. Well, Steve, give us a few URLs. The crybaby says about Google, “We did not enter the search business,” he said. “They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”

Now, let me attack the other side. Droid users are still waiting for Flash 10.1 capability in their browser. What's holding up the installation? Duh, is Flash crashing the Droid in the labs? Surfing many automobile web sites with the Droid is like driving a stripped car, all because this android flagship ain't got the Flash. Yet Nexus One does have it.

As an end user, the bickering between industry leaders is getting annoying. Where is Shirley Temple when we need her? Why are techies so argumentative? Just fix the bugs and move on.

Now, let me throw a public opinion survey in your face.

http://mashable.com/2010/02/26/html5-flash-poll/

HTML5 vs. Flash- HTML5 wins

I neither like or dislike Flash. But in terms of functionality and the way the world currently browses, it is inexcusable for Apple to lock them out. Give the user the choice to either enable or disable Flash on the iPad. It should not be the prerogative of one company to cause another's product to become extinct by exclusion.

[Tamara]

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/29/...r-html5-video/

It appears that Brightcove is going to be providing HTML5 video options for their clients - http://www.brightcove.com/en/why-bri.../our-customers

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by Tamara

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/29/...r-html5-video/

It appears that Brightcove is going to be providing HTML5 video options for their clients - http://www.brightcove.com/en/why-bri.../our-customers

All Brightcove is doing is providing H.264 video stream in addition to their Flash video stream. But the Flash video stream will be the one seen by the vast majority of users.

In effect, they are providing an alternative proprietary format (H.264) in addition to their Flash offering.

Of course, the iPad will still be limited to viewing dumbed-down version of most major entertainment, arts and sports sites. Those still use Flash for key elements beyond video on their main sites.