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Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

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Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#51

Post by ido »

CodeMage wrote: post #32
warfangle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"even 'fast' JS VMs are still rather slow" Compared to C, Java, OCaml, and so forth, perhaps. Compared to Ruby, Python, and PHP - not so much. (take a look at the v8 entry. and this is from '09 - v8 has seen some performance improvements since then) http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependabil...

None of those comparisons really matter in this discussion, except Java, which is clearly out of the competition anyway. Why? Because unless you're suddenly running Ruby, Python, PHP, C or OCaml as a client-side script embedded in your browser, you're comparing apples to oranges. It would be interesting, though, if someone could point me (and everyone else) to a reasonable, credible comparison of HTML5+JS vs. Flash v…

Why is java clearly out of the competition anyway?

I think this is a remnant from a time long gone, where applets were much worse than they are now. They have worse user experience than flash, but the difference isn't really that big anymore (e.g. http://www.pulpgames.net/milpa/).

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#52

Post by xtacy »

cookiecaper wrote: post #50
borisk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash player gives Adobe a lot of power and keeps their not so good dev/design tooos safe from competition. From what I've seen the current strategy is to try to add features not available in HTML5, like P2P. That would allow youtube and company to roll out torrent-based players and save hugely on bandwidth.

Why couldn't you implement P2P in JavaScript? You'd have to work around browser sandboxing that prevents access to the disk, but you can do that by installing as an extension. I think a JS-based torrent client is reasonable. "New features" is not a good answer; it might stave things off a bit longer, but the real problem in Flash is that Adobe is choking it to death and only really provides first-class support on Win…

With Google pushing for NativeClient, P2P within the browser could very much be possible with a proper security model.

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#55

Post by wtallis »

IdeaHamster wrote: post #4

I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn't to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5? How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn't belong?

Migrating to open standards is the right thing for Adobe to do, but that's not how Adobe likes to do business.

Adobe is lazy. If there's a problem with their software, they'll blame it on somebody else, because talk is cheap. If that doesn't work, they'll wait until the last possible moment to actually put in the time and effort to improve their code. It's a pattern that is most evident with their Mac software:

CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001). Prior to CS5, they were still using the Mac OS 9 GUI APIs, which, though they weren't officially totally deprecated until June 2007, were obviously always just a transitional compatibility environment. Even prior to the official deprecation of the Carbon UI APIs, Adobe had plenty of reasons to port to Cocoa. Number one was to provide a truly OS X native look-and-feel, which is pretty much impossible to emulate via Carbon.

Adobe's approach to dealing with Flash performance on OS X has been similar. When people complained that video playback was unreasonably slow (ie eating up 5x the CPU time that a standalone player would use), they blamed Apple for not providing them with direct low-level access to the video decoding hardware. When Apple called their bluff and gave them exactly what they asked for, Adobe released a flash player that used those APIs but wasn't noticeably faster for anybody, and introduced several new glitches that made it a step backwards for everybody who's Mac predates the NVidia 9400M chipset.

On the Windows side of things, Adobe's PDF reader has been such a long-standing resource hog that third-party PDF readers have garnered significant market share in spite of their lack of support for most of the recent advanced features of PDF. If Adobe would take better care of their PDF implementation, it would be good for the progress of the format overall.

Further back, Adobe kept their font format (PostScript Type 1) proprietary and expensive so long that Apple had to create TrueType, and Apple ended up licensing it to Microsoft. Several years later, Adobe abandoned Type 1 in favor of co-developing a TrueType-based successor (OpenType) that is finally re-unifying the font market.

Adobe seems to think they're playing it safe by being the last rat off each sinking ship, but one of these days, they'll be too slow.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#56

Post by barrkel »

buster wrote: post #46
catch23 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have flash on my N1 too (froyo), but it's definitely noticeable when the webpage has flash on it -- even when it's a tiny flash ad somewhere. Scrolling the webpage becomes really choppy -- sometimes I wish I could disable all flash except for when it's used for video.

uhm.. yes you can.. and i think that's the only thing to do when you want to have a decent webbrowsing and flash experience. In the browser options you can disable plugins. You'll have to press the area of the plugin to make videos and games work, then. Disables all those flash ads, though.

It also doesn't always work; some pages' flash content gets through.

I ended up just uninstalling Flash. The extra content it made available wasn't worth the hassle of the occasional flash ad getting through.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#57

Post by middlegeek »

I have had more success than the author. It should be important to note that Flash on a mobile device is not going to be as easy to use as it is on a PC because the device is not as easy to use as a PC. I love having Flash on my phone as it allows me to see Flash enhanced navigation, mapping sites and the occasional game.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#58

Post by daleharvey »

cookiecaper wrote: post #23

Adobe is seriously doing it all wrong. They have to open-source the Flash Player and everything around it now. They can keep the IDE proprietary if that floats their boat, it's just a premium authoring tool, but the only way to save Flash is to open-source like NOW. HTML5 is still young enough that an open Flash Player and standard and protocol (RTMP) would effectively kill it. Open-sourcing would open so many doors.…

its already far far too late for adobe, if they had open sourced 10 years ago, there wouldnt be a html5 video and canvas, flash would be the standard.

open sourcing it now will help them stay relevant for longer but it will be a band aid, proprietary tools will be replaced by web standards on the internet thats more obvious now than it ever was. flash can innovate by raising the limit on what you can do, but there is a roof on that functionality the gap between it and where web standards are now is getting smaller and smaller.

Re: Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

#60

Post by gamble »

wtallis wrote: post #55
IdeaHamster wrote: post #4

I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for Adobe wasn't to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5 authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5? How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn't belong?

Migrating to open standards is the right thing for Adobe to do, but that's not how Adobe likes to do business. Adobe is lazy. If there's a problem with their software, they'll blame it on somebody else, because talk is cheap. If that doesn't work, they'll wait until the last possible moment to actually put in the time and effort to improve their code. It's a pattern that is most evident with their Mac software: CS5 (…

> Adobe's PDF reader has been such a long-standing resource hog

It makes me feel old to remember a time when Adobe reader didn't suck.

The great PDF support in OSX is one of the things that's most jarring to lose when I use a Windows machine. It's incredible that you have to download a third-party utility just to view PDF files on Windows properly, and none of the options even comes close to Preview on the Mac. In fact, the only aspect of working with PDF files that does suck on the Mac is Adobe Acrobat itself.

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