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

cppguy said:
That's exactly what I'm worried about. I love Flash a lot, and you should, too. No I'm not crazy, let me explain. Right now Flash ~= unwanted content, so we can block them by not using this completely optional plugin. Sooner or later the entire Web will be HTML5, and then we'll no longer be able to separate the useful content from the junk. HTML5 is not a plugin that we can simply disable, it'll be just HTML, as simple as that. Garbage will be part of the normal content, and unless someone develops some form of an AI, it'll be very hard to keep things in control.

And I believe this is exactly why Steve doesn't like Flash and pushes HTML5 instead. Apple started their anti-Flash campaign when they got into the online advertisement business. That might not be a coincidence. If HTML5 prevails, we won't have an easy way to extend our battery life and fight overly annoying animated ads that fill the entire screen. Trust me, a few years from now we'll all miss the good old Flash days, when it was so easy to weed unwanted content.
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This. Ever since click-to-flash.
 
I dream of a life without Flash...

It had its day. Its day is over. Adobe, become the best damn HTML5 company out there. Don't let pride get in the way of letting go of legacy technology.

Want to know the primary reason Windows is such a code pig? The L word. Want to know why Adobe is at a live-or-die crossroads? The L word.

I'll bet that the last company to make buggy whips made the very best buggy whips you have ever seen. And where are they now?
 
a104375 said:
When will Adobe throw in the towel. No one likes flash anymore it isn't cool, the most it is "okay" for is games, and do we really need to support more flash based games? Most of which are crap anyhow.
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Most of what is produced by any technology is crap.
Most Buildings are crap.
Most Trains, Planes and Cars are crap.
Most Games are crap, flash or otherwise.

It really is no reason to stop the search for the Classics
 
cmaier said:
Your reading comprehension sucks. I've said it twice. Here is number 3. If you are not intentionally going to a flash site - that is, if all that flash is doing is making your banner ads be extra intrusive - you are much better off disabling flash and improving your battery life. The argument that disabling flash in that scenario makes no sense because some day HTML5 ads will sick just as much is the argument i was addressing with my analogy.

Maybe all those distracting flash ads are making it hard for you to concentrate.
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Exactly. I use a Flash blocker at work in Firefox. It's freaking amazing how much non-video content is using Flash. Utter waste of my time, and it's easy to see where battery life decreases when wasting user resources like that.

As usual, this thread is filled with biased commenters. My bias is as a user, don't care about 'ease of programming', screw you guys, learn whatever you have to learn, and don't whine about doing your job to customers. Maybe if 'good' Flash programmers were the norm instead of the exception, there would be fewer users against y'all.
 
Chwisch87 said:
The tech media is notoriously biased towards apple... have you ever seen an article where they said, we reached out to Adobe for a comment on the issue. Well guess what, here is something apple doesn't tell you; Adobe has commented on this in the past.

According to an Adobe flash engineer, the Mac OS doesn't provide Adobe with the proper API structure to optimize Flash for the mac. Windows does. I use flash on windows of course all the time and strangely, use hardly uses near the battery the mac version does nor the processor cycles and maybe crashes on me once a month.

I have actually had to stop using Safari on the mac because it crashes literally every hour at least. Firefox doesn't give me these issues lol.

And here is the underlining problem. Apple has always believed in a walled in garden, and when someone else tries to come in and plant something it ends up causing issues. HTML5, which is a browser based product runs will on the mac.

In effect, apple needs HTLM5 to be relevant because they can't write an OS that is actually worth 2 cents.
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Then explain to me how OS X seems to provide the proper API for hardware acceleration for Photoshop in OS X?:confused:
 
Lynch is spitting lies on our face... We all have seeing the impact in battery. After I have installed flash block in my macbook, battery life extended for more than an hour. A big deal if you ask me, in pc side many laptops hardly stay open for 2 hours.
 
Chwisch87 said:
The tech media is notoriously biased towards apple... have you ever seen an article where they said, we reached out to Adobe for a comment on the issue. Well guess what, here is something apple doesn't tell you; Adobe has commented on this in the past.

According to an Adobe flash engineer, the Mac OS doesn't provide Adobe with the proper API structure to optimize Flash for the mac. Windows does. I use flash on windows of course all the time and strangely, use hardly uses near the battery the mac version does nor the processor cycles and maybe crashes on me once a month.

I have actually had to stop using Safari on the mac because it crashes literally every hour at least. Firefox doesn't give me these issues lol.

And here is the underlining problem. Apple has always believed in a walled in garden, and when someone else tries to come in and plant something it ends up causing issues. HTML5, which is a browser based product runs will on the mac.

In effect, apple needs HTLM5 to be relevant because they can't write an OS that is actually worth 2 cents.
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api apple use for mac is openGL, nothing you can;t have access to.

also I use windows and flash a lot, same **** different OS. crashes and battery drain like hell, an cpu utilization up to 75%.
 
...what they're doing is hurtful

Good luck trying to gain sympathizers by sounding all hurt. We're ready to move on.

Its funny how adobe tries to act like their product isn't proprietary by saying 'apple is trying to prevent people from expressing themselves...' and 'We don't think it's good for the web to have aspects closed off'

in other words, we want flash to continue its monopoly, whats so wrong with that?
 
The simple reality:

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html

"As mentioned, Safari wouldn't play the HTML5 videos on Windows, so I have no Flash vs. HTML5 comparisons there (I tested this on three Windows computer and the HTML5 page wouldn't play on any of them). However, Flash's ability to access hardware acceleration in 10.1 dramatically reduced Safari's CPU consumption from 23.22 to 7.43, a drop of 68%, which really makes you wonder how Flash would perform on the Mac if it could access hardware acceleration. "

"While Chrome's numbers were more efficient on Windows, playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient. "

Flash on windows runs a lot better then html5 , its the implementation on OSX.

Then the question: is this done deliberatly by apple or just bad programming by Adobe . Seeing its running fine on windows ...
 
It's worth noting that many HTML 5 features are still in their infancy compared to Flash, so it's probable that HTML 5 performance will close the gap over time, and potentially exceed it.

Flash has been pretty stagnant when it comes to core technological improvements, and it is still a real performance nightmare, so while early HTML 5 implementations may not be ideal, I wouldn't expect that remain true for long with Apple and Google behind WebKit.
 
KnightWRX said:
Of course, straight HTML doesn't produce results like Flash does either. HTML5 heavily uses Javascript for Canvas animations which... dum dum dum... is a JIT compiled language on modern browsers.
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Granted but Apple does have more control on HTML 5 resources, implementation and bugs. This is way to important to leave this to Adobe, they could kill the iOS platform (or the air) with buggy and unsafe software. Flash needs to die.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
Photoshop is not doing video rendering. Difference processes and would be different API calls.
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Good point, but Apple has published an API for hardware-accelerated video rendering some time ago.
Besides, developers have been able to use OpenCL for quite some time now, so Adobe has had access to hardware-accelerated video. They had an option and a seemingly good one, but they chose not to take it.
 
Bonte said:
Granted but Apple does have more control on HTML 5 resources, implementation and bugs. This is way to important to leave this to Adobe, they could kill the iOS platform (or the air) with buggy and unsafe software. Flash needs to die.
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Apple could always grab the spec docs for Adobe's site and roll their own, like the gnash people did.

Soliber said:
Good point, but Apple has published an API for hardware-accelerated video rendering some time ago.
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Ah, good old Video Decoding Acceleration framework. Released April 2010. It would be nice if Adobe used this in a release version of Flash. Oh wait, they did. If Apple had released it earlier, maybe Adobe could've added to Flash... err.. earlier ? As it stands, Adobe jumped on it as soon as Apple released it.

For video decoding, there's no one to blame but Apple. They were late in giving 3rd party developers access to a proper API.

And the funny thing is, this framework is only supported on a very small margin of GPUs that Apple ships. nVidia only, 9400m and 320m only.

Soliber said:
Besides, developers have been able to use OpenCL for quite some time now, so Adobe has had access to hardware-accelerated video. They had an option and a seemingly good one, but they chose not to take it.
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Ah, OpenCL. Barely a year old and not at all made for video decoding particularly. OpenCL is not some kind of voodoo magic. It permits offloading some computation to the GPU, but it doesn't let you use the proper hardware paths for video decoding. You're going to basically write a software video decoder, offload to the general purpose processor on the GPU. This won't be optimized at all, and I'm guessing it will be as hard to write as any other software decoder.
 
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Winni said:
It's called facts and reality. Something that Mr Jobs prefers to ignore or distort.

Do you think that HTML5 -- which is used as a synonym for a bundle of various different technologies -- is a magic bullet that does video playback or running interactive content at zero cost?

Just look at what happens to your precious battery when you watch a movie with it with Apple's own software -- it'll drain very, very quickly, because playing back video content is extremely expensive.

Now Flash is not only a video technology, it is also a complete runtime environment for multi-platform software like Java or .NET. You don't get such a sophisticated technology for free and when your marvelous HTML5 gains momentum, you will see that the very same ad banners will annoy you and that all of a sudden your battery life will also suffer like crazy. Only this time, you don't have the comfort of being able to install a Flash blocker -- you will have to suffer through all those ads.
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Hi,

I think you are right.

There is another question. There were even speculations about Apple rejecting Apps from the Mac App Store because they use "too much" power.
But why does Apple not go back to the 68000 then? It does not make sense to put in fast processors (even iPad has 1 GHz) if you are not allowed to actually use them.
In other words: It is not Apple who pays my electricity bill. I can decide for myself if something is worth the cost used or not.

Christian
 
nitro912gr said:
Lynch is spitting lies on our face... We all have seeing the impact in battery. After I have installed flash block in my macbook, battery life extended for more than an hour. A big deal if you ask me, in pc side many laptops hardly stay open for 2 hours.
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All the Ars test showed is that if you load less content you spend less power.

You can extend your battery life indefinitely by turning it off and never loading any content at all.

Enjoy.
 
cppguy said:
That's exactly what I'm worried about. I love Flash a lot, and you should, too. No I'm not crazy, let me explain. Right now Flash ~= unwanted content, so we can block them by not using this completely optional plugin. Sooner or later the entire Web will be HTML5, and then we'll no longer be able to separate the useful content from the junk. HTML5 is not a plugin that we can simply disable, it'll be just HTML, as simple as that. Garbage will be part of the normal content, and unless someone develops some form of an AI, it'll be very hard to keep things in control.
Click to expand...

It could be as simple as a preview and a play button, its completely illogical to autostart all movies, animations and games on a single page. Flash has gone zombie on us a long time ago.

KnightWRX said:
Apple could always grab the spec docs for Adobe's site and roll their own, like the gnash people did.
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"supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9, SWF v10 is not supported by GNU Gnash."
Apple will always be 2 versions behind and i don't see why they would put so much effort in supporting a flawed and insecure plugin, it will never work. I could agree if Google would eventually get it to work but all they got now is a stuttering Flash-video-player, Apple can't wait another 4 years for it to happen.
 
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