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Adobe Testing MacBook Air-Optimized Version of Flash Player

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The ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe over Flash technology took another interesting turn over the past month as the new MacBook Air became Apple's first Mac to ship without Flash Player pre-installed. A review from Ars Technica noted that the battery life of the small notebook took a significant hit when browsing the Web with Flash Player installed, leading Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch to observe that it takes more power to display Flash content than it does to not display it, and claim that HTML5 content of a similar nature to that presented in Flash would use just as much or more power.

According to Engadget, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen yesterday noted that the key to conserving battery life lies in hardware acceleration, and reported that the company currently has a version of Flash Player optimized for the new MacBook Air in testing.
He said it's really all about optimizing for silicon: "When we have access to hardware acceleration, we've proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform." You wouldn't be blamed for thinking that sentence a cop-out, but that's actually not the case -- the chief executive says they've presently got a Macbook Air in the labs and have an optimized beta of Flash for the device presently in testing.
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Apple revised its policies earlier this year to allow for hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 video by third-party developers on select graphics cards, including the NVIDIA GeForce 320M that is included in the new MacBook Air. Following a period of beta testing, Adobe released an updated version of Flash Player 10.1 in mid-August to officially bring hardware acceleration to a number of Mac models.

Article Link: Adobe Testing MacBook Air-Optimized Version of Flash Player
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/11/17/adobe-testing-macbook-air-optimized-version-of-flash-player/
I get the impression that if it wasn't for Steve constantly pressuring and harassing Adobe to fix Flash and make it a reasonable experience on the Mac, Adobe would be doing absolutely nothing to improve their Mac version of Flash. Good for Steve. It shouldn't take a nonstop stream of public shaming to cause Adobe to actually fix their software.
 
This gets the the root of my issue with Flash. The fact that Adobe has to optimize the code for a specific laptop means they have too much control over the user experience.
Less popular devices (and OS's) will not get the same attention from Adobe and therefore wont see this type of system specific optimization.

Adobe should take the lead on the Flash OpenScreen project and release a functional open source Flash player as a basis for others to optimize on their own player.
 
I wish Adobe would learn the meaning of the phrase "put up or shut up." For all their claims of being unfairly attacked by Apple (who has made officially, what, 2 or 3 statements on the matter?) they sure don't seem to be able to fix the actual problems with Flash. If they would redirect some of this energy they spend whining into making Flash suck less, there would be no problem.
 
anubis said:
I get the impression that if it wasn't for Steve constantly pressuring and harassing Adobe to fix Flash and make it a reasonable experience on the Mac, Adobe would be doing absolutely nothing to improve their Mac version of Flash. Good for Steve. It shouldn't take a nonstop stream of public shaming to cause Adobe to actually fix their software.
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My exact thoughts. It's taken them how long to even try ...?
 
I recently took Gruber's advise on DaringFireball.com and removed the Flash plugin from my Mac with a keyboard shortcut to load the current page in Chrome using its built-in Flash Plugin when I need Flash.

So far so good -- I no longer get Flash doing the "memory hog" thing in Activity Monitor because now Flash runs when I need and I can quit it when I don't.

I've also noticed less annoying ads (but that could have been accomplished with ClickToFlash).

Given I have an iMac I was never concerned about "battery performance", but mainly with memory usage. It seems the more RAM we get the more that applications tend to waste (or worse, leak). It's not just Adobe.... Safari and iTunes can seriously bloat, as can OpenOffice. The latest versions of Safari, iTunes, and OpenOffice all seem to be doing better though -- nice to see improvements from software vendors in this area.

Folks have said that OSX 10.6.5 helps with memory management so that may also be why I am seeing improvements on various apps.
 
I'm confused. If Apple opened the door to hardware acceleration on the 320M in April, and Adobe released Flash 10.1 in August to support the 320M, 9400M etc., then why do they now need to build an optimised version for the MBA? Is there something else in the MBA configuration that makes it different to anything else with a 320M?
 
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what a crock of ****

in what way is it optimised for the Air? if such a version existed, it would doubtless outperform the current plugin on ALL macs.

Flash needs to die, and quick.
 
Digitalclips said:
My exact thoughts. It's taken them how long to even try ...?
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There's nothing quite live blissful naivety to make a false argument! :p

The boring reality is that Adobe actually required hardware (GPU) and API (driver and OS) enhancements from Microsoft, Apple, ATI and NVIDIA to develop, test and introduce proper hardware acceleration to their software.
 
I have Flash on my Droid, and let me tell you: sometimes I regret it. It's unbearably slow, clunky, crashes the browser, and drains the battery like a mofo. Don't even ask it to try streaming video: it makes the phone choke and die. I only keep it around because of those occasional websites that absolutely require Flash to operate. (which I hope are soon to be extinct)
Everything Steve said in his "Thoughts on Flash" letter rings true.

It's not just a Mac problem.
 
mungler said:
in what way is it optimised for the Air? if such a version existed, it would doubtless outperform the current plugin on ALL macs.

Flash needs to die, and quick.
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Hardware acceleration means that the software is utilizing the graphics hardware for a lot of the processing instead of the CPU.

The current Flash plug-in does not have these optimizations for the MacBook Air's graphics hardware, so much of the calculations are being done in software with the CPU, which chews up a lot of power.

I would be happy to see Flash die. I am very glad that I do not have it on my iPad.

That said, I am pleased to see that Adobe scrambling desperately to improve Flash on OS X after years of neglect.
 
I’m glad. Sounds worth doing. For all Adobe’s empty and misleading public comments, they also are clearly doing real work to gradually improve some of the years-long problems with Flash (which go back before Adobe even owned it).

But as they work on improving security holes, crashes, battery drain and performance, I will keep in mind: video is not all Flash is, and not all Flash video (probably not even most) is H.264. Flash animation—in fact, Flash simply being on the screen doing nothing—also drains battery.

My fans came on right now, for a Flash ad that has already stopped moving. When you need that much CPU power to do nothing, something is amiss!

I hope Adobe ultimately succeeds in making Flash as good as we wish it was. If not, I hope they make Flash (or Flash-like tools) a truly excellent, complete tool for HTML 5. (Because until somebody does that, Flash is here to stay—maybe no longer as widespread and vital, but it will be around because it’s cheap to develop for.)
 
I do not understand what is unique to the Macbook Air such that the API enhancements introduced by Apple for H.264 decode offloading to the GPU might not work or require changes...

I suspect they're actually talking about Flash 10.2, of which an early version is available, that finally takes advantage of Cocoa, dropping use the deprecated Carbon - for which there is no excuse that it has taken so long.

That's separate to video decode offloading for H.264 which is the major battery life consumer!
 
Demigod Mac said:
I have Flash on my Droid, and let me tell you: sometimes I regret it. It's unbearably slow, clunky, crashes the browser, and drains the battery like a mofo. Don't even ask it to try streaming video: it makes the phone choke and die. I only keep it around because of those occasional websites that absolutely require Flash to operate. (which I hope are soon to be extinct)
Everything Steve said in his "Thoughts on Flash" letter rings true.

It's not just a Mac problem.
Click to expand...

The best I've seen Flash running on a mobile device was that Playbook video comparing web browsing on the iPad versus the Playbook, and even that was not as smooth as the HTML-5 demo they ran.
 
Beating a dead horse

Optimizing Flash with hardware acceleration is like putting a V-8 in a Model T. Yes, it's faster than before. No, it's not modern or even forward-looking.

Adobe should drag their a**es into the 21st century and put more resources behind tools that create HTML5.
 
cvaldes said:
Hardware acceleration means that the software is utilizing the graphics hardware for a lot of the processing instead of the CPU.

The current Flash plug-in does not have these optimizations for the MacBook Air's graphics hardware, so much of the calculations are being done in software with the CPU, which chews up a lot of power.

I would be happy to see Flash die. I am very glad that I do not have it on my iPad.

That said, I am pleased to see that Adobe scrambling desperately to improve Flash on OS X after years of neglect.
Click to expand...

I suspect you're wrong there as the H.264 offloading is provided by a generic Apple API...

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2010/tn2267.html
 
anubis said:
I get the impression that if it wasn't for Steve constantly pressuring and harassing Adobe to fix Flash and make it a reasonable experience on the Mac, Adobe would be doing absolutely nothing to improve their Mac version of Flash. Good for Steve. It shouldn't take a nonstop stream of public shaming to cause Adobe to actually fix their software.
Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing.
 
Flash uses more power, which causes more carbon output, which kills the earth.

Save the earth, kill flash. :D
 
nicklad said:
There's nothing quite live blissful naivety to make a false argument! :p

The boring reality is that Adobe actually required hardware (GPU) and API (driver and OS) enhancements from Microsoft, Apple, ATI and NVIDIA to develop, test and introduce proper hardware acceleration to their software.
Click to expand...

I agree, you summed your own reply up correctly in your first paragraph :)

The boring reality is Flash, developed a long, long time ago, is archaic.
 
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