Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM • Hacker News Board

Re: Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM

#11

Post by ZeroGravitas » Thu, May 06, 2010, 2:40 PM UTC

UnknownSource wrote: post #8

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the smartphone market (and indeed any non-standard desktop OS or hardware) was also held up by lack of Flash support. You have Intel executives banging on about "the whole internet" or the "real internet" etc. in other words don't buy that (or invest money in offering them for sale) as they don't run Flash. That was their one big talking point against ARM. They even slagged off the iPhone for this…

ZeroGravitas. Apple also banged on in 2004 about how awesome PowerPC was compared to Intel. Remind me what happened 2 years later? Yes, companies do slag others off.. The smartphone market was held up for many other reasons too. It mostly came down to the fact that the mobile OS's sucked at the time. One would have also expected Android/iPhone sales to have been flat without flash support, and this is untrue (Apple h…

If there's X things that make a market look unlikely to succeed and so prevent investment, then things are going to develop even slower if it's X+1 instead. Poor Flash support is just one more thing that hampered smartphones, just as it hampered Linux. I'm not saying either were perfect if you ignore Flash support.

My point with Intel is that they're going to choose the very worst aspects of their competitors to talk about. If ARM phones could kill your pets, or explode in your face, then Intel would be talking about that. The fact that they were talking about Flash support means that it must have been, in their opinion, one of the biggest weaknesses of ARM in the smartphone space.

Re: Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM

#12

Post by UnknownSource » Thu, May 06, 2010, 4:24 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #10

UnknownSource wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Gnash fixes anything. The reason why flash is so prominent is that there is no good flash-creator-like program out there that outputs files as HTML5/SVG/AJAX/Javascript. People use Flash because it is the only good way to create animations that work for many people, but with a proper editor, we could eliminate the need for additional addons entirely.

But if Gnash can run anything the Flash "IDE" outputs, then everything works. If enough people start using non-Adobe implementations of Flash, applications will have to be tested against those implementations.

But we both know it wont in the real world. We also know that Adobe will probably change the Flash output slightly in the future, and Gnash will always be a step behind.

It doesn't change the fact that you would be wasting development resources, because you then have duplicate functionality. Why waste resources on developing an addon, which will need to be updated with the browser api's, for many browsers, and optimised, when the browsers themselves already have the functionality built in? If resources are spent optimising the browsers themselves rather than a foreign addon, every website benefits.

Fact is, the same problem's we've had with flash addon in the past (such as in cases where updating the browser caused crashes), will still exist in Gnash player instead.

Why are you so eager to encourage people to duplicate functionality browsers are building into their core code these days?

You can either improve the browser, or you can improve Gnash. Both are open source. Unless there is something the flash standard can do which open standards couldn't?

Re: Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM

#13

Post by 10ren » Thu, May 06, 2010, 5:05 PM UTC

The iPhone's 3.1.1 rejection of CS5 is very dangerous to Adobe, because it undermines their platform's relevance. Particularly during a changing of the guard. One response is to ensure their great tools work well for HTML5 (which is probably in their interests anyway); but Flash remains valuable and worth protecting. IMO, they now have an extremely strong motivation to make Flash work on ARM.

Wonder what's stopping them?

I agree with the article that ARM smartbooks need the whole web, since they are competing with the near-universal applications on the x86 platform. But maybe even that isn't enough, since the network is intrinsically slow and unreliable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput... and consider the demand for iPhone native apps.

Perhaps faster javascript and RIA will fix this, enabling "native" webapps.

Re: Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM

#14

Post by rbanffy » Thu, May 06, 2010, 7:41 PM UTC

UnknownSource wrote: post #12

rbanffy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if Gnash can run anything the Flash "IDE" outputs, then everything works. If enough people start using non-Adobe implementations of Flash, applications will have to be tested against those implementations.

But we both know it wont in the real world. We also know that Adobe will probably change the Flash output slightly in the future, and Gnash will always be a step behind. It doesn't change the fact that you would be wasting development resources, because you then have duplicate functionality. Why waste resources on developing an addon, which will need to be updated with the browser api's, for many browsers, and optimi…

There are lots of applications, in embedded devices, that are built with Flash and target Gnash instead of the Adobe runtime.

Gnash is reasonably good and supports hardware-acceleration. I agree we should move over to HTML5 as soon as possible (taking encumbered codecs in consideration), but some flash support is a nice to have, even if it's not full support.