Why is it ok for other Apple products to use Flash?

[Hankster]

I find all this discussion about Flash crashing Macs funny. I have two MacBooks and over 50% of my browsing is with streaming video and I almost never crash - ever. And, in regards to the battery drain...it's the same as running PhotoShop or iMovie or another program.

 

[BaldiMac]

HTML5 still doesn't really have the ability to replace interactive advertising and games though. This is the area that flash is being used the most these days.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Most consumers won't miss interacitive advertising and most flash games won't work with a multitouch interface anyway.

I find all this discussion about Flash crashing Macs funny. I have two MacBooks and over 50% of my browsing is with streaming video and I almost never crash - ever. And, in regards to the battery drain...it's the same as running PhotoShop or iMovie or another program.

Your personal experience does not change the fact that flash is the number one source of crashes on a Mac.

 

[bozzykid]

I just wanted to note the irony.

You do realize I was responding to a post about Firefox for Maemo? The two quotes have nothing to do with each other. But I guess you didn't bother to read them and just wanted to try to make yourself look supreme.

 

[BaldiMac]

You do realize I was responding to a post about Firefox for Maemo? The two quotes have nothing to do with each other. But I guess you didn't bother to read them and just wanted to try to make yourself look supreme.

I wasn't trying to look supreme. I'm trying to take part in a discussion. I realize what your posts were about. I was pointing out the logical inconsistency in your statements.

For HTML 5 you only want to talk about currently. When responding to current problems with Flash, you bring up a future version of Flash.

 

[NT1440]

I find all this discussion about Flash crashing Macs funny. I have two MacBooks and over 50% of my browsing is with streaming video and I almost never crash - ever. And, in regards to the battery drain...it's the same as running PhotoShop or iMovie or another program.

Whats that tell you? Macs don't crash that much, BUT WHEN THEY DO most of the time it's because of flash. If I were in Job's position I'd be pissed about that too.

 

[Sketh]

I find all this discussion about Flash crashing Macs funny. I have two MacBooks and over 50% of my browsing is with streaming video and I almost never crash - ever. And, in regards to the battery drain...it's the same as running PhotoShop or iMovie or another program.

I can sort of see your point, about it being no different than photoshop and what not.

The difference is that you expect your system to be strained when editing a picture, or movie. You DON'T expect it to be strained while browsing the web and coming across a site with multiple flash ads, which it sometimes would do.

 

[smetvid]

I'm not sure what your point is here. Most consumers won't miss interacitive advertising and most flash games won't work with a multitouch interface anyway.



Your personal experience does not change the fact that flash is the number one source of crashes on a Mac.

And where is this fact coming from? Just because Steve Jobs told us this doesn't mean it is true. Anybody can fudge those types of numbers. Has anybody ever thought that maybe it is Safari or OSX that is part of the problem. Crashes happen because a glitch between two pieces of software. How do we know that Apple doesn't want to cooperate with Adobe and then when the plugin doesn't work well they turn around and blame Adobe. I mean if Apple will not work with Adobe to adapt Flash to use the hardware a bit better what exactly is Adobe supposed to do? They can only improve support on a system if that system is willing to work with them.

I used to visit an Apple store during my lunch break every day at work mainly because I eat in ten minutes and need to kill 50 minutes. Every computer in the store had people running Flash heavy websites and never once have I seen a Mac in the store crash. I also teach web design and animation at a college that uses only Macs in the classroom and labs and they never crash due to Flash and my students use Flash everyday. I am not saying it cannot happen but that the amount of crashes are way over exaggerated.

 

[GorillaPaws]

...never once have I seen a Mac in the store crash.

It crashes the browser and brings up the crash report log, not the entire OS. Also, your anecdotal observations hardly outweigh the aggregate of all incoming crash reports from the totality of Mac users sending them in.

 

[smetvid]

I can sort of see your point, about it being no different than photoshop and what not.

The difference is that you expect your system to be strained when editing a picture, or movie. You DON'T expect it to be strained while browsing the web and coming across a site with multiple flash ads, which it sometimes would do.

But animation is animation and it will always be cpu intensive regardless if it is through Flash, Shockwave or HTML 5. Some may be slightly more lean then others but a HTML 5 full of banners is still going to eat up the cpu.

Look the internet is moving to a more fluid visual style. Like it or not but that is what it is. It will never be simple text and graphics like it was in the 90's. Those days are over. Dialup users faced the same exact problem when jpegs became popular in websites. My parents still have to use dialup and even the most basic site with no animation takes forever to load. That is just the nature of the beast.

The internet is a marketing tool and it has been a huge boost to the economy. Do not think for a second that HTML 5 will not have the same level of abuses of over use of animation. If fact it will be worse, much worse. Everybody and their brother will be adding amateur animation all over the place. HTML 5 isn't really all that much faster at code execution either. HTML and javascript are still scripting languages that run in a browser and they will always be slow no matter you try to jazz them up. I'm not saying HTML 5 isn't slightly more efficient but that the difference is going to be pretty small and if you have a slow system animation is going to be slow no matter what.

 

[smetvid]

It crashes the browser and brings up the crash report log, not the entire OS. Also, your anecdotal observations hardly outweigh the aggregate of all incoming crash reports from the totality of Mac users sending them in.

But have you seen these reports or are you just taking the word of a business man who clearly has an agenda to sell apps?

I'm also not saying it doesn't happen, just that myself and everybody I know who use Macs have not had it happen very often. I also notice it not happening on PC's very often. My company streams live video through Flash to corporations. We stream globally and can stream to over 2 million people at a time and we hardly ever get reports of the browsers or our stand alone applications crashing. Many times we stream up to two hours at a time and it is rock solid during that time. Maybe we are doing something right that nobody else is doing but I doubt it. Now 98% of our market are PC users so maybe that plays a huge part in this. Why is it that nobody looks at Apple for the support of Flash? After all shouldn't two companies work together to help make sure things work?

I'm not saying one company is more right then the other but the fact is that Adobe has something to gain by supporting Flash on a Mac. Apple on the other hand seems to have something to gain by not supporting it. Who does it look like is there with open arms to settle these issues? Adobe would love nothing more then to adapt Flash to the Iphone but they get no love or support from Apple to do so.

What I would like to see are benchmark tests of Flash on a Iphone or Ipad. How do any of us really know how good or bad it really runs. In my experience I never trust anything a company tells me no matter who they are.

 

[SteveSparks]

I know how apple feels about Flash on the Iphone/Ipad but if it's such a problem and it's so buggy - why do they allow their macbooks, imac's etc to use it?

I love the new Ipad and I am going to pre-order but I can't believe 100% it's an issue of stability. It has to be a reflection of money being made in the app store right?

Macbook, Macbook Pro, Imac (any OS10 Mac product) = Flash good to go.

Iphone, Ipad (both use the app store) = Flash too unstable.

Seems like they are feeding us a load of bs.

imac, mbp etc = full computer, its up to you to program it etc

iphone, ipad, ipod = device, mfg controls the experience

The ipad and iphone might be computing devices but dont confuse them with computers. They are a between a hand held video game and a computer.

 

[EssentialParado]

IMO, Adobe's best path forward, if they want to help the web advance instead of holding it back, and they want to be relevant to web media in five or ten years, is to build that tool. Adobe has extensive in-house SVG experience and would be almost uniquely positioned to do it. Conceivably they could even modify Flash to output SVG + JavaScript instead of generating SWF files.

That's a pretty progressive idea actually. At the end of the day Adobe make their money on the content creation tools, not the code it ends up as. The best thing Adobe could do is probably create a HTML5 animation and game-creation suite.


smetvid- I cannot believe anyone would make an argument based on their experience of how many Macs crash in the Apple store during their lunchtime break. Do you not own a Mac?
And FYI, it's rarely the Mac itself crashing, it's the browser. It happens to me, and while it doesn't happen frequently, when it does, 99% of the time it comes with a message that says, "this was likely caused by the plugin: [Adobe Flash Player]" — So I most certainly believe the numbers Apple have reported regarding Flash being the biggest cause of crashes.

 

[GorillaPaws]

But have you seen these reports or are you just taking the word of a business man who clearly has an agenda to sell apps?

I'm basing this off of John Gruber's Daring Fireball article:

Serlet didn’t name any specific guilty plugins. Just “plugins”. But during the week at WWDC, I confirmed with several sources at Apple who are familiar with the aggregate Crash Reporter data, and they confirmed that “plugins” was a euphemism for “Flash”.

It's possible that these "sources at Apple" were intentionally misleading Gruber as some part in a master plan of Apple deception to bring down Flash. Or, infinitely more likely, Flash is the biggest cause of problems on OS X, and Apple is frustrated that they've had to put a lot of energy into working around it's limitations because it's closed source and Adobe is too cheap/lazy to bring it up to speed, and unwilling to open-source it.

I'm also not saying it doesn't happen, just that myself and everybody I know who use Macs have not had it happen very often.

Do you have something else that crashes more often? If not, then it's probably the #1 crasher for you and your friends too. I've already mentioned earlier how hard Apple has worked to try to get around Flash's flaws, it's not like Apple hasn't been trying, it's just that there's not a whole lot more they can be doing if Adobe isn't willing to either improve their code or open it up for others to do for them.

 

[bozzykid]

I wasn't trying to look supreme. I'm trying to take part in a discussion. I realize what your posts were about. I was pointing out the logical inconsistency in your statements.

For HTML 5 you only want to talk about currently. When responding to current problems with Flash, you bring up a future version of Flash.

Um, I was pointing out why it was removed from a release candidate build. There were no inconsistencies except ones you are trying to fabricate. I love the direction HTML5 is headed, so I don't see what you are talking about.

 

[UltiMac]

I won't miss Flash. Not worried about it at all. It's Apples device, they can design it to support/not support whatever they feel. It's my feeling they know something we don't. Maybe?

Regardless, if it came right down to it, it's not like Apple couldn't write some code and support it if they wanted to down the road. There's not an anti-flash chip soldered on the logic board

I agree with the power draining effects Flash has on devices. Even on my Macbook Air, if I launch a flash video or animation, my fans go full tilt, and the bottom of my Mac becomes so hot I can barely touch it. Ridiculous. I can browse the web for hours, but as soon as I visit a flash site...fans come whirring on.

The thing I don't understand is why Adobe hasn't figured out some way to shrink loading times/sizes of Flash files. On average I wait 2x longer for a flash site to load than most others...often longer.

I don't blame Apple. They want a great mobile device with good battery life, not something that's going to overheat and have it's battery drained.

 

[BaldiMac]

And where is this fact coming from? Just because Steve Jobs told us this doesn't mean it is true. Anybody can fudge those types of numbers.

I would trust Jobs and Serlet's quotes based on millions of crash reports over Hankster's experience with two MacBooks. If Adobe had any reason to doubt the claims, you can bet that they would be denying it publicly. And considering a defamation lawsuit.

Has anybody ever thought that maybe it is Safari or OSX that is part of the problem.

Of course people have thought that. But the problem isn't browser specific. Or platform specific, though it is worse on OS X than Windows. That is why Safari and Chrome (and upcoming Firefox builds) developers have recently implemented features to isolate plugin processes to insure plugin crashes don't bring down the whole browser.

 

[Sketh]

But animation is animation and it will always be cpu intensive regardless if it is through Flash, Shockwave or HTML 5. Some may be slightly more lean then others but a HTML 5 full of banners is still going to eat up the cpu.

Well, when I view a 720p HTML5 video my CPU is at 20-30%, with Flash it's at 50-60%.

At fullscreen HTML5 is just 50-60% while Flash is 70-80%.

Which type of media would YOU prefer to view?

 

[BaldiMac]

Um, I was pointing out why it was removed from a release candidate build.

You might have meant to point that out, but you never actually got around to it.

There were no inconsistencies except ones you are trying to fabricate.

Fabricate? What's with the animosity?

I love the direction HTML5 is headed, so I don't see what you are talking about.

To paraphrase... Somebody said there are cool demos of what can be done with HTML5. You said that you only want to talk about what's currently out there. Then somebody said the mobile version of Flash currently sucks. You said that Adobe has demoed a new version to address these problems.

There is nothing wrong with either of these statements. But their is some irony there!

 

[diamond.g]

The only thing that I wonder about with HTML5 video is encryption/copy protection. Sites like Hulu and Netflix use Flash (Silverlight) to deter stream (movie, tv show) copying. How does one accomplish the same thing with HTML5?

 

[bozzykid]

You might have meant to point that out, but you never actually got around to it.

I responded directly to the post and even quoted it. Or did you not actually read my post?

 

[BaldiMac]

I responded directly to the post and even quoted it. Or did you not actually read my post?

Did you read your post?

Here it is:

This is why Adobe is working on flash 10.1 for mobile devices. It will be in almost every mobile browser except mobile Safari by the end of the year.

Where did you point out "why it was removed from a release candidate build"? The quote from Mozilla explained why it was removed.

 

[bozzykid]

Where did you point out "why it was removed from a release candidate build"? The quote from Mozilla explained why it was removed.

Uhm, I quoted the post that said why. I didn't need to say it. Again, you try to make a correlation that didn't exist between two unrelated posts of mine.

 

[BaldiMac]

Uhm, I quoted the post that said why. I didn't need to say it.

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Again, you try to make a correlation that didn't exist between two unrelated posts of mine.

No, I noted a small and inconsequential bit of irony between two unrelated posts of yours. Which apparently offended you. I apologize for the offense.

 

[NT1440]

I can't even watch an episode of House online because my cpu has flash running at 90+%.

 

[michael.lauden]

Well, when I view a 720p HTML5 video my CPU is at 20-30%, with Flash it's at 50-60%.

At fullscreen HTML5 is just 50-60% while Flash is 70-80%.

Which type of media would YOU prefer to view?

+1, let's also keep in mind how new HTML5 actually is. Wait until it's an industry standard, and when all browsers are made to run HTML5. How sick would it be to not have to join a BETA group on youtube to stream HTML5

one thing that is annoying: space bar doesn't pause! and clicking on the video doesn't pause either. Oh well, that's what you get for joining a Beta! I'll gladly share my usage w/google <3