Did Facebook Save Flash?

[Dr McKay]

That was the only funny and amusing thing in the whole thread.

And you were able to deliver it with such a deadpan expression... i am impressed, and refuse to play poker with you.

You've never really used flash much on Windows have you? When my old 1.8Ghz intel celeron could handle 1080p flash video and use about 5-8% processor usage, and have never had a flash related crash. But my friends quad-core i7 MacBook almost gets brought to its knees running YouTube in 480p...

 

[Spectrum Abuser]

You've never really used flash much on Windows have you? When my old 1.8Ghz intel celeron could handle 1080p flash video and use about 5-8% processor usage, and have never had a flash related crash. But my friends quad-core i7 MacBook almost gets brought to its knees running YouTube in 480p...

I honestly cannot believe that. With Pre-intel Macintosh thats completely accurate. But post intel machines can run flash just as good as Windows.

EDIT: And don't even get me started on that processor. I had a 1.6Ghz celeron and Youtube at 720P pushed it up to 70% load. Your numbers could defiantly be lower if you also sported a good video card and hardware acceleration, but not 5-8% low.

 

[Dr McKay]

I honestly cannot believe that. With Pre-intel Macintosh thats completely accurate. But post intel machines can run flash just as good as Windows.

His fans go crazy and his CPU goes into 400% usage. And 50/50 whether the browser crashes.

 

[andrewlgm]

I have had so many debates about flash - defending and criticizing flash at the same time. I don't know where I stand. I don't hate it like apple does, nor am I in love with the thing. But I use it enough that I was willing to let go of an iPad due to it.

My university web-portal and blackboard are entirely flash based, so anytime I showed up on campus - 4 times a week - with an iPad I was entirely locked out, and had to make my way to the library... so all this argument that flash is dying is true, but it's not dead yet. And while it is not dead, some of us will be locked out, either locked out of necessary services, or locked out of the iPad and other devices that don't support flash. As for now I have completely given up on the iPad and am not in the least excited for the new products.

 

[Fernandez21]

I have had so many debates about flash - defending and criticizing flash at the same time. I don't know where I stand. I don't hate it like apple does, nor am I in love with the thing. But I use it enough that I was willing to let go of an iPad due to it.

My university web-portal and blackboard are entirely flash based, so anytime I showed up on campus - 4 times a week - with an iPad I was entirely locked out, and had to make my way to the library... so all this argument that flash is dying is true, but it's not dead yet. And while it is not dead, some of us will be locked out, either locked out of necessary services, or locked out of the iPad and other devices that don't support flash. As for now I have completely given up on the iPad and am not in the least excited for the new products.

If running flash is important to you, pick up a playbook, it has the best browser I have seen on a mobile device and runs flash just fine. There are hardly any apps though.

 

[haravikk]

HTML5 has potential to make good games

Oh it's definitely possible, my point is that Flash currently has a lot of good tools for making them which makes it much easier over all, especially for hobbyists. By comparison, HTML5 is only really now making it possible for games to compete, but the tools aren't there yet to fully support them to the same degree, which means there's a lot more grunt work to do until more libraries are developed for people to take advantage of.

Personally, what I think would be most interesting would be if Adobe worked on positioning Flash (the editor) as a means of building HTML5 content, and provide the libraries to support it. I mean, HTML5 lacks the kind of easy vector support of Flash, and ActionScript is essentially a language designed to be interpreted into Javascript anyway.

If this meant that Flash sites could convert their content into HTML5 at the push of a button, and still enjoy the same ease of creation, and avoid loosing time invested in learning Flash (or acquiring people who know it), then Adobe could easily allow Flash to survive. After all, the Flash platform has always been free, it's the editor that Adobe makes their money from, so retooling the Flash editor to build HTML5 with Flash libraries would allow the Flash and Flex to survive quite handily.

 

[Luis Ortega]

My opinion on it is that it's like saying you hate clowns or mimes. No one (or very few people) really have a reason to dislike them. It's simply one of those cool things to say now.

The main reason they say it is because Jobs used to say it.
I've never had a problem with Flash, except when it is blocked on my iphone or ipad that can't play it.

 

[jterp7]

I honestly cannot believe that. With Pre-intel Macintosh thats completely accurate. But post intel machines can run flash just as good as Windows.

EDIT: And don't even get me started on that processor. I had a 1.6Ghz celeron and Youtube at 720P pushed it up to 70% load. Your numbers could defiantly be lower if you also sported a good video card and hardware acceleration, but not 5-8% low.

hmm..I'd have to try the identical flash sites/streams on say a zenbook to be sure, but I'm not seeing this. My pre-i5 q9550 desktop (almost 4 years old) runs it infinitely better than my 2011 MBA. It's in the programming/implementation on the mac. It's just bad on the mac exclusively, there's no other way of saying it.

 

[VulchR]

+1 just for making me smile.

The thought of a crazed person chasing a street musician down with the hopes of beating him with his own guitar... or chasing a mime... (Side thought, if a mime is being chased, do they scream??) It just makes me laugh a little... Or a lot...

Just to clarify: I haven't actually done this. But I do imagine it with a certain satisfaction.... This clip from Animal House pretty much sums it up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eh2KPGBHMM

 

[tmarks11]

You've never really used flash much on Windows have you?

only here for the ipad chatter. My three desktops and laptop are all win7 machines. So yes, I have used flash a lot on windows machines. My 10yo loves to play the upteen thousands of flash games all over the internet.

And yes, my i5 and i7 machines have no problems. But my flash experience was painful on winXP atom equipped netbook and an amd geode win XP equipped UMPC. It took very little to hit 100% cpu useage when they encountered flash, which frequently crashed the machines. And I expect similar performance woes on a low powered tablet.

And yes, I miss flash on my ipad. Usually when I encounter financial sites that use them for plotting fund information. And even those financial sites which have dedicated ipad apps usually don't offer all the features of their websites.

But I no desire to play flash games on my ipad; equivilent apps run much smoother, have better interfaces, and have better graphics. That is definitely where less flash is better.

 

[Dr McKay]

I honestly cannot believe that. With Pre-intel Macintosh thats completely accurate. But post intel machines can run flash just as good as Windows.

EDIT: And don't even get me started on that processor. I had a 1.6Ghz celeron and Youtube at 720P pushed it up to 70% load. Your numbers could defiantly be lower if you also sported a good video card and hardware acceleration, but not 5-8% low.

My old machine did have some ATI 512MB Video card. I forget the model. But that was so long ago that Flash didn't even support hardware acceleration.