Adobe CTO on Flash's Effect on Battery Life, Apple's Negative Campaigning

[DarkWeasel]

FlashBlock?

I sometimes wonder if I am the only person in the world who has heard about Flash Blocker plugins. Someone should inform Jobs that with this tool preinstalled, someone can preserve his/her precious battery time but can play any content that he/she really wants to. Magic!

 

[reallynotnick]

My solution is just to use an adblocker, than none of my battery life is wasted on advertisements and I can still enjoy flash content.

 

[orbital]

The iOS argument is getting old. I worked with a Dev who ported a flash game from desktop to Android and said the performance was abysmal. I agree that flash video should work but most flash sites are too CPU hungry.

 

[MattInOz]

To some extent, it is a "false argument", but most of the Flash content on the web is content that I don't actually want. So, if it gets me two extra hours of battery, I'll at least continue to run a Flash blocker. He's no doubt correct that you're viewing less content without Flash and you should see a boost to your battery because you're rendering fewer items. What he didn't mention is that most of those items are undesirable. Ads are necessary, but they shouldn't suck 33% off the battery life of a user's laptop. That's over the top.

Indeed. He's also conceding that banning Flash (or any animated ads) would reduce client computer power usage by a significant factor. Sure not everyone uses they computer for web surfing all the time so it's not a 33% reduction, but we are still talking about megawatts of power wasted on needless advertising. Well additional megawatts of power wasted on yet more needless advertising.

 

[Pilgrim1099]

Flash is dead, don't blame Apple, they are just the messenger.

Oh really?

Then read this:

http://mashable.com/2010/10/07/w3c-stalls-html5/

W3C is in charge of the web standards along with other partnerships. Not Apple nor Adobe. Those who say Flash is dead, blah blah blah.

Flash is here to stay until things improve. Adobe is'nt perfect, but at least they make great products for the creative industry. I get the impression Steve Jobs is squealing like a girl all these months whining about them. So ask yourselves this. How can Jobs whine about Adobe and then allow them to produce an iPad Photoshop application?

You know that Adobe Express is available for the iPad, right?

 

[frankly]

I chose my words carefully. I said they were TRYING TO TAKE THE ROLE OF... You could be the new kid on the block and try and seize control - or you could be a behemoth.

If you don't understand the politics of what Apple is doing - it's not my job to explain it here. Do some reading.

Apple is only trying to make their products the best they possibly can. Flash makes them worse so they do not include the option on their iOS devices and they are now requiring the user to download the plugin if they want to use it on their Mac. They are NOT telling Google, Nokia, RIM, or anyone else that they should not include Flash. That is the opposite of a dictator. Perhaps it is you that should do some reading and you should start with a dictionary.

Why does everyone keep acting like the battle for Flash is over what video codec is going to deliver entertainment to you?

I hate to say it but Flash is NOT going anywhere, you have a generation of graphic designers/coders trained to use flash script building interactive websites and banner ads. Some may learn javascript to keep up but alot are not keen to switch over anytime soon, especially given javascript being a more complex language better suited for programmers than designers.

Flash will disappear and it will not take as long as most people think. The only thing that can prevent that is if Adobe were to dedicate significant resources toward improving the efficiency of it. Gone are the days when desktops ruled the land. Mobile devices are rapidly taking over the market and especially the ad landscape. Those devices will dictate which technologies win and not only is Adobe extremely late to the party but their first run at a solution is horribly lacking.

Yes, best solution is having Flash installed with a Flash blocker. Wouldn't mind seeing that for iOS-based Safari.

That is not the best solution. The problem with Flash blockers is that they tell the website you are visiting that you have Flash installed and then they prevent the content from being displayed. Therefore, if the site has created alternate content you won't see it AND more importantly they won't have statistics of you visiting their site without Flash because the Flash blocker just told them you have it installed.

I respect your opinion. And agree to a point. But you have to realize there are plenty of people in this thread who are screaming for the death of Flash and/or saying HTML5 is the "wave of the future." That being said - killing flash isn't the answer per se because when/if flash gets replaced - it will be replaced by something equally as draining on battery life as per the examples given. So yes - TODAY - there would be a difference. But for how long. If advertisers can't use flash - they would resort to HTML5 - and then you have the same problem

So those that want to kill flash aren't "solving" anything in regards to battery life in the long term. I think (I said think) that was the point of the counter-argument.

You have no proof of this. In fact, developers have proven over and over again that they can make new technologies that use less battery as they invent and iterate.

 

[cmaier]

I sometimes wonder if I am the only person in the world who has heard about Flash Blocker plugins. Someone should inform Jobs that with this tool preinstalled, someone can preserve his/her precious battery time but can play any content that he/she really wants to. Magic!

Why should someone inform Jobs? He isn't involved in this subject at all. Ars Technica, not Apple, pointed out the issue. Steve hasn't forbidden Flash from running on macs - he just stopped preinstalling out-of-date versions of Flash. You are, like Adobe, trying to distract us from the truth by raising false issues.

 

[coleridge78]

HTML is a descriptive language and is static. What you probably want to compare with is JavaScript. And as stated by someone else, it uses JIT just the same.

What do you mean, precisely, by static? HTML5 particularly is not "static" in the way that most people would use the term. "Descriptive" (or "declarative") does not imply "static".

 

[ColdZero]

I don't understand whats the big deal about this arstechnica test that they did. The took a bunch of animated ads that were rendered in Flash and replaced them with static images and they're surprised that they had more battery life?

How is it even a valid comparison, you were doing processing to do the animations in flash....and doing nothing with html5.

If I go run a marathon, I'm sure as hell going to need to eat sooner than if I sat on my couch for the whole day.

Take those animated ads and convert them to animated html5 and then rerun the tests, thats a fair comparison.

 

[Xenious]

and pretty much anything involving flash is worthless and not something i want to see (like animated banners, or stupid pseudo games or slower than snails menu interfaces).

 

[Soliber]

Apple fanboys are making me pull for flash. Most of the hate is really because Steve doesn't like it because it cuts into Apple's bottom line, just like HTML5 will in the future, but since it's not ready yet, he promotes it to bash Flash. But if HTML5 replaced flash, Steve would hate it just as much, specially if it uses less resources. It's like with USB 3 now, Apple is pro Light Peak, so now there are some who talk about USB 3 in a negative way. I mean why would anyone here just all of a sudden have a problem with USB 3. The normal, non fanboy response would be to would be to support both. USB 3 because of all of all the USB devices out there, and Light Peak for all the cool things that it will be able to do. Just be happy that it's much better than what we have now. As for eSata. I have an eSata port on my laptop, I'm going to get an eSata dock because I hear I can boot from it, and that sounds cool, have an extra OS on a hard drive for testing purposes. Before I got a Mac I remember always reading about up coming technology, on different websites and everybody excited about the future, but here it's like wow. If it's not Apple, bash, bash, bash. If I go to a non Apple website, and read about USB 3 and Light Peak, comments would be different.

What are you on about The sole reason no Mac to this date has USB 3.0 is because Intel has not included support for it in its chipsets.
The costs of adding an extra third-party chip, just to be able to support USB 3.0, is not worth it for Apple, nor is it for the majority of their demographic.
The whole point of Lightpeak is to be able to use almost *everything* through it. Intel and Apple are trying to create something which would/will enable us to use one type of connector and one type of cable for just about everything except powering the computer.
There is no point (from their point of view), to hastily support USB 3.0, which is brand spanking new mind you, when Lightpeak is apparently just around the corner.
It's got nothing to do with "bash, bash, bash", it's just that most of the people here probably know the underlying story.

 

[samcraig]

Apple is only trying to make their products the best they possibly can. Flash makes them worse so they do not include the option on their iOS devices and they are now requiring the user to download the plugin if they want to use it on their Mac. They are NOT telling Google, Nokia, RIM, or anyone else that they should not include Flash. That is the opposite of a dictator. Perhaps it is you that should do some reading and you should start with a dictionary.


You have no proof of this. In fact, developers have proven over and over again that they can make new technologies that use less battery as they invent and iterate.

To your first point - again - do some research. If you don't think Apple is actively trying to put Flash out to pasture, you're naive.

To your second point - you have no proof the the contrary and we're not not talking about vaporware. We're discussing HTML5 vs Flash. Or maybe you didn't notice?

 

[savar]

The difference is it is trivial to block gif and jpeg by scanning img tags (often by also looking at the dimensions of the image). It is much harder to discern ad content from non-ad content when the content is all in the form of pure html and javascript.

Well... <brief aside> if a site I am visiting is running obnoxious ads, I will leave. I don't run an ad blocker because I like the sites I'm visiting to get the ad views they need to stay in business. The free market is pretty good at sorting out issues like this.

Back on track: the future of HTML5 animation is in the <canvas> tag and the future of HTML5 video is in the <video> tag. These are tags just like <img>, <object>, and <embed> which are easy to find and remove from the page, and they also have heights and widths which can be used to find things that look like standard format advertisements.

Also, advertising will continue to be delivered from 3rd parties, and so it will be easy to see javascript scripts that get loaded from 3rd party servers (just like image blockers work right now) and prevent them from loading.

As a developer, I'm looking forward to HTML5. I'll be able to take everything I know about standard web technologies and tools and put that to good use doing new things. I had to debug a flash app last year and it was a huge pain just to get the debug plugin installed and set up breakpoints, let alone learn enough actionscript to understand what was going on. Free Flash development tools for Mac were hard to find and install. It took 2 long days to pinpoint the problem (turns out it was a firefox bug, not a flash bug, but oh well.)

In the HTML5 future when a chart/graph/animation/etc. breaks I will just pop open Firebug and flip over to the javascript debugger and get to work. There are so many great tools out there that are free, well supported, and well documented, that in my mind Flash doesn't hold a candle to HTML5 + Javascript.

 

[AppleFan1984]

Adobe says Flash uses the same or less battery power than HTML5????

What crack are they smoking?

HTML is compiled to native machine code?

 

[aristotle]

Oh really?

Then read this:

http://mashable.com/2010/10/07/w3c-stalls-html5/

W3C is in charge of the web standards along with other partnerships. Not Apple nor Adobe. Those who say Flash is dead, blah blah blah.

Flash is here to stay until things improve. Adobe is'nt perfect, but at least they make great products for the creative industry. I get the impression Steve Jobs is squealing like a girl all these months whining about them. So ask yourselves this. How can Jobs whine about Adobe and then allow them to produce an iPad Photoshop application?

You know that Adobe Express is available for the iPad, right?

Yes, the W3C is in charge of the web standards. Flash is not a web standard. It is a proprietary language supported by a web browser plugin. The W3C is silent on plugin content as it is not part of the HTML specification or any other W3C web standard.

 

[frankly]

Apple fanboys are making me pull for flash. Most of the hate is really because Steve doesn't like it because it cuts into Apple's bottom line, just like HTML5 will in the future, but since it's not ready yet, he promotes it to bash Flash. But if HTML5 replaced flash, Steve would hate it just as much, specially if it uses less resources.

This is the most ridiculous analysis I've read thus far. First, how does Flash cut into Apple's bottom line? Second, how in the hell with HTML5 cut into their bottom line in the future? Apple promotes HTML5 because they control the software that renders it, namely Webkit. They can improve the speed of Webkit or fix bugs in it if they need to. Their hands are tied when it comes to Flash. If they were to install Flash on the iPhone and then a bug were discovered they would have to wait for Adobe to fix the bug, then they would have to test it, and then release it. Does Adobe look like they move fast on things like that based on their development schedule for getting Flash to even run on mobile devices?

The difference is it is trivial to block gif and jpeg by scanning img tags (often by also looking at the dimensions of the image). It is much harder to discern ad content from non-ad content when the content is all in the form of pure html and javascript.

Really? What about looking at where the HTML and Javascript were being loaded from since most ads are served from a third party server?

I sometimes wonder if I am the only person in the world who has heard about Flash Blocker plugins. Someone should inform Jobs that with this tool preinstalled, someone can preserve his/her precious battery time but can play any content that he/she really wants to. Magic!

These are fine for the Mac but would be a HORRIBLE idea on an iOS device. Besides, if Apple had not pushed for HTML5 video then do you think this would have had a chance of happening?

The iOS argument is getting old. I worked with a Dev who ported a flash game from desktop to Android and said the performance was abysmal. I agree that flash video should work but most flash sites are too CPU hungry.

Flash video KILLS mobile devices. Have you ever tried to load a page that contains Flash on an Android device? It is painful.

Seriously, to the fanboys. SHUT. THE. HELL. UP. Flash is here to stay until things improve. Adobe is'nt perfect, but at least they make great products for the creative industry. I get the impression Steve Jobs is squealing like a girl all these months whining about them. So ask yourselves this. How can Jobs whine about Adobe and then allow them to produce an iPad Photoshop application?

You know that Adobe Express is available for the iPad, right?

Jobs doesn't whine about Adobe. He talks about Flash being a poor implementation. I really can't figure out what you're trying to say here.

To your first point - again - do some research. If you don't think Apple is actively trying to put Flash out to pasture, you're naive.

To your second point - you have no proof the the contrary and we're not not talking about vaporware. We're discussing HTML5 vs Flash. Or maybe you didn't notice?

You have to actually point to something Apple has done to ACTIVELY put Flash out to pasture, aside from not including it on their own devices. I would agree that they are trying to put it out to pasture on their own devices but this is not the same thing as knocking it off all together, which is what you are implying.

Second, I gave my proof. The fact that we have H.264 chipsets, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad that run off of the A4 chip with 10+ hours of battery life doing some pretty damn impressive tasks that USED TO BE very battery and processor intensive proves my point. You are completely wrong when you say that EVERYTHING new will use just as much power if not more.

 

[0dev]

CTO of Adobe talks up Flash!

In other news, Steve Jobs calls the iPad "magical" for the billionth time and Bankers tell everyone they're doing a good job...

 

[Adey]

How can Jobs whine about Adobe and then allow them to produce an iPad Photoshop application?

I don't think Steve Jobs has EVER whined about Adobe. He whines about Flash. And, he has every right to because in today's market it is inherently flawed.

I guess you're just hearing what you want to hear, eh?

 

[inkswamp]

Lynch also claimed that displaying the same content in Apple-supported HTML5 technology would use as much or more battery power than in Flash.

I don't claim to understand the technical minutiae of how Flash runs on the desktop, but I do know that Adobe has been dragging its feet for years in bringing their software up-to-date on the Mac platform, and that some of the potentially power-saving changes they could implement (hardware acceleration being the first to come to mind) has been lacking. I tend to doubt that Apple's browser playing back video with Apple's own HTML5 implementation and Apple's own media libraries is going to be as power-hungry as Flash.

Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems like more attempts by Adobe to muddy the waters and hide the fact that they've neglected their code (at least on the Mac side of things.)

 

[a.gomez]

yeah - and if I work on Photoshop, batteries take a hit...

if my brother plays his 3d chess game, batteries take a hit...

if I keep wireless on, batteries take a hit...

and YES if I WANT TO SEE the real "NEXT 3 DAYS" movie site, not the static/boring no flash mobile ready one, batteries will take a hit

but seeing how those activities provide a value to me, I do not care.
If batteries die That is what my HyperMac is for - Oh wait, Apple does not like that either

 

[solid12345]

Flash video KILLS mobile devices. Have you ever tried to load a page that contains Flash on an Android device? It is painful.

That's great but this still doesn't solve the issue that most interactive/animated websites are made with Flash and it's not easy overnight for creative types to become Java developers. Anything involving complex raster graphics being animated at 24-30fps is going to eat your battery no matter what.

 

[ImperialX]

I don't care what people say, having FlashBlock saves an hour of battery life. That's what's important to me.

 

[Benjamins]

I sometimes wonder if I am the only person in the world who has heard about Flash Blocker plugins. Someone should inform Jobs that with this tool preinstalled, someone can preserve his/her precious battery time but can play any content that he/she really wants to. Magic!

Arstechnica is the website that points out that by not installing flash, you get an extra hour of battery life.

As far as Apple goes, they just said it is better for the users to download and install the latest/greatest Flash plugin.

 

[samcraig]

Second, I gave my proof. The fact that we have H.264 chipsets, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad that run off of the A4 chip with 10+ hours of battery life doing some pretty damn impressive tasks that USED TO BE very battery and processor intensive proves my point. You are completely wrong when you say that EVERYTHING new will use just as much power if not more.

because it's not using flash nor heavy html5 sites which don't exist yet. You're now talking in circles. The point is that it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other as far as flash vs html5 now. Only different being is that there aren't html5 sites/ads/etc in nearly abundance.

ETA -= and h.264 video isn't the only purpose for flash.

 

[ghostface147]

Flash is dead? No, not even close. The demand for that skysomething browser in the App Store proves that people still want flash. I don't see why Adobe can't develop an iOS version and ship it via Cydia.