Adobe's Flash Player 10.2 to Offer Up to Ten-Fold Improvement in CPU Efficiency

[PeterQVenkman]

You mis-interpreted my comment. I find it ironic that my G5 2hz PPC nearly peaks at 180 degrees whilst I try to watch the demo video.

Ah, I see. My old G5 could melt my face off doing the simplest of tasks, and it sounded like a vacuum cleaner while doing it. Good riddance, G5!

lol, yea, I was gonna say, do all of the flash developers wear weird stuff like that?

Hey, now! I know of one famous captain who seduced countless green women wearing a similar shirt...

Even if Flash were perfectly efficient, Click2Flash usage will continue to increase, and Flash will become increasingly irrelevant to advertisers.

Keep going with that - as flash becomes increasingly irrelevant to users, HTML5 and javascript will become more relevant.

Once the marketers start getting involved, it will become tainted like everything else they touch.

 

[nuvolino]

new version better then old

WOW i have to agree with it using less cpu then the old one!! with me i cant even get it to install past 95% SO WHEN FLASH IS NOT EVEN ON MY MAC it definitely uses less cpu then the previous version

infact when i tried to install even 10.1 i still couldnt install it past 95% it would bug out the installer and freeze with 5% to go

so yeah it definitely uses less CPU and its 10x better then it actually running lol

(mind you all in all its a shame that adobe are such retards at programming flash its all their fault everyone is jumping ship)

 

[Burger Thing]

Battery life is relevant to a relatively small group of people. I am not aware of people other than college students sitting in outdated rooms...

For the sake of USA's future, I hope that the level of awareness among other children of lilo777's age is significantly higher

 

[iMaggot]

So instead of crashing Safari once a day, it will now only crash Safari once every 10 days? Progress!

Lol you still use Safari ?

 

[gnasher729]

When Flash 10.2 comes to OSX, I wonder if it'll use OpenCL? Probably not, I'll bet it uses some proprietary closed Adobe voodoo.

How would OpenCL help in Flash? Flash is all about displaying graphics. OpenCL is for doing non-graphics things using a graphics card. OpenCL is the one technology that will never, ever be used to display graphics.

 

[-=XX=-Nephilim]

This was news, errrmmm, few weeks ago... But hey better late than never!

Looking forward to it

 

[Heilage]

This is good. It's always better when products improve.


Will I stop using Clicktoflash? Nope. Mostly because of advertisements. But watching YouTube will be better.

 

[foiden]

Well, this was posted a good bit, but mainly on the Macbook Air forums, not the general news discussion. And yes, even the beta of 10.2 made a remarkable difference playing video. While not as battery efficient as HTML5, for the same resolution, it certainly decreased the CPU load significantly. Even allowing something like the 11" stock MBA, to play 1080p Youtube content smoothly like the famous Big Buck Bunny Animation. (Which is probably the most demanding flash video out there considering it takes more to display that than the 1080p Avatar trailer.)

I still keep click to flash. I do like controlling which of my flash content I see. No problems with it, and it also keeps things running better. It's really the pages that load up like 10 different flash things, like a bunch of different flash ads, that pose a problem. I find flash ok, but too many sites way overdo it. They just don't realize that often enough, the coders of flash are sloppy and quite a few of them don't play well with each other. So they often invite something that is like a Flash Clash, in which the combination of them brings down practically every browser I throw at it. Whether it is Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer in Windows.

 

[macintoshtoffy]

Doesn't need encoding support on Youtube's end - the improvement's all in the playback engine. Didn't you see the same video being played back with the new and old APIs?

Doesn't anyone read the bloody article? it clearly states that the YouTube player has already been updated:

but YouTube has already updates its player & others will follow.

Its right there in black and white so why keep asking stupid questions or make stupid statements on matters already addressed?

 

[AppleFan1984]

To me, the most interesting question about Flash behavior is why Adobe didn't natively provide the click-to-flash functionality from the start.

Wouldn't that also apply to Safari's inability to block iAds?

 

[AppleFan1984]

Except for the last set of tests done on phones, I think the rest of the tests were done on Windows computers.

Actually, of the test results shown in my post cover a fairly broad range of OSes: the first one (with the chart) and the the second were done on Snow Leopard, the third was on Windows, the fourth and fifth on iPhone and Nexus.

Wasn't one of Steve Jobs' issues with Flash was that Adobe was glacially s-l-o-w in upgrading Flash for Apple's products, putting Apple at a disadvantage?

Even today, at the top of their game, Apple has about 6% of the global market share. I love OS X, but I gotta keep it real when evaluating other developers' priorities.

Back in those days, the mid-90s when Apple posted two consecutive years of losses with a 2.2% share and the viability of the platform was in doubt among even its most loyal fans, one can hardly blame Adobe for being among the majority of software developers who finish their Mac ports after they ship their Windows version.

To this day, the majority of software publishers don't port to Mac at all.

So if Apple has a problem gaining enough market share to attract that majority of developers and make OS X their top priority, I can't blame the developer.

Look, I love OS X so please understand that this isn't about what I prefer, but simply business and ROI.

Fortunately for all of us, Adobe makes a highly disproportionate amount of their revenue from the Mac community, so they continue to ship to Mac and Mac people continue to reward that effort with strong sales.

But as with any other publisher, if they release for Mac later than they release for the other 91% of the world, I can't exactly blame them for that.

And in this case with Flash Player 10.2, the main issue is that Apple didn't expose the GPU to plugins in their APIs. So yes, there was a disadvantage in performance on Mac, but if we're going to be honest about it that one lies with Apple at least as much as with Adobe, arguably more so given how quickly this optimization was completed once those APIs were shared.

 

[BaldiMac]

And in this case with Flash Player 10.2, the main issue is that Apple didn't expose the GPU to plugins in their APIs. So yes, there was a disadvantage in performance on Mac, but if we're going to be honest about it that one lies with Apple at least as much as with Adobe, arguably more so given how quickly this optimization was completed once those APIs were shared.

No, that wasn't the main issue. The APIs that you refer to only help with h.264 video. Complaints about Flash performance on a Mac were and are about considerably more than h.264 video. Also, there are millions of legacy flash videos on the web that this optimization will not affect. And complaints about Flash in general are about more than performance. It's also about stability, security, and (my reason for blocking Flash) privacy.

Apple has provided a way to play hardware accelerated h.264 video even before releasing these APIs for Adobe. Adobe just chose to process the video on their own.

 

[BigMac2]

Actually, of the test results shown in my post And in this case with Flash Player 10.2, the main issue is that Apple didn't expose the GPU to plugins in their APIs. So yes, there was a disadvantage in performance on Mac, but if we're going to be honest about it that one lies with Apple at least as much as with Adobe, arguably more so given how quickly this optimization was completed once those APIs were shared.

Like BaldiMac said before me, All GPU acceleration API is about video, more specifically H.264 video. It change anything to the real problems, the actionscript interpreter waste to much cpu cycle for doing nothing good. Right now Flash look like a badly ported API from win32 world, which is a other ugly beast.

 

[BaldiMac]

Wouldn't that also apply to Safari's inability to block iAds?

First, Safari doesn't contain iAds, so I'm not sure where you were going there.

If you were referring to ads in general, then you took FloatingBones point out of context. His complaint was that Flash allowed programs to be run on his computer without his permission.

(Ironically to your comment, iAds do require user interaction to run their associated applications.)

 

[AppleFan1984]

No, that wasn't the main issue. The APIs that you refer to only help with h.264 video. Complaints about Flash performance on a Mac were and are about considerably more than h.264 video.

The scope of complaints from Mac loyalists since Jobs posted his "Thoughts on Flash" is well understood, but what benchmarks are available to substantiate them?

So far most of the benchmarks I've been able to find illustrate what we can anticipate logically: moving a lot of pixels around algorithmically will consume significant CPU cycles, and in many cases the pre-parsed tokenized bytecode in Flash is more efficient than having to first parse XML to eventually arrive at a similar output.

If you've found benchmarks showing otherwise they'd be very helpful, but equally surprising given that browsers need to work so much harder than Flash given that they're starting with raw text source while Flash does that process in the IDE to generate its bytecode.

Also, there are millions of legacy flash videos on the web that this optimization will not affect.

Of course, but as with any new way of doing things you can't blame the vendor if webmasters don't jump on board immediately. Look at how many web sites are dragging their feet with HTML5 (though in all fairness that probably has as much to do with the W3C's recommendation that HTML5 isn't ready for deployment yet).

And complaints about Flash in general are about more than performance. It's also about stability, security, and (my reason for blocking Flash) privacy.

There can be many good reasons to block any plugin. In fact, I have all JavaScript blocked by default thanks to Firefox's NoScript extension.

Prudent web users also keep their coookies turned off by default as well, and allow such things only when needed as they determine for themselves, not as some web developer chose for them (man, are cookies the most overused web feature or what?).

And the truly savvy user never runs their computer from an admin account except for those few times when it's necessary, spending most of their time in a non-admin account that can't be rooted. OS X is a certified Unix system - why not take full advantage of the security features Unix provides?

These things are a matter of subjective priorities, but I agree it's good practice to err on the side of security.

Apple has provided a way to play hardware accelerated h.264 video even before releasing these APIs for Adobe.

Yes, but not for plugins.

I'm not making this up. It's been the subject of much discussion all over the web, and has had fairly broad implications on performance as this update illustrates.

 

[BigMac2]

So far most of the benchmarks I've been able to find illustrate what we can anticipate logically: moving a lot of pixels around algorithmically will consume significant CPU cycles, and in many cases the pre-parsed tokenized bytecode in Flash is more efficient than having to first parse XML to eventually arrive at a similar output

If you've found benchmarks showing otherwise they'd be very helpful, but equally surprising given that browsers need to work so much harder than Flash given that they're starting with raw text source while Flash does that process in the IDE to generate its bytecode.


Of course, but as with any new way of doing things you can't blame the vendor if webmasters don't jump on board immediately. Look at how many web sites are dragging their feet with HTML5 (though in all fairness that probably has as much to do with the W3C's recommendation that HTML5 isn't ready for deployment yet).

You should stop dragging those old benchmark, and you should start to educate your self about bytecode and ecma interpreter that Flash, Squirrelfish and Tracemonkey are. The last 2 years was an incredible race from all browser maker to optimize Javascript performance, every week we got a new beta of Firefox, Opera or Webkit with improve performance. Adobe have never rethink their ecma interpreter that is over 10 years old. This is what killing Flash right now, and this is why Flash suck so much on all platform beside Win32.

Arstechnica have a good article about Mozilla borrow Webkit Javascript engine for speed over its old Tamarin engine developed originally by Adobe for the Actionscript.

 

[BaldiMac]

The scope of complaints from Mac loyalists since Jobs posted his "Thoughts on Flash" is well understood, but what benchmarks are available to substantiate them?

How about we avoid the stereotyping and argument grouping and name calling?

So far most of the benchmarks I've been able to find illustrate what we can anticipate logically: moving a lot of pixels around algorithmically will consume significant CPU cycles, and in many cases the pre-parsed tokenized bytecode in Flash is more efficient than having to first parse XML to eventually arrive at a similar output.

If you've found benchmarks showing otherwise they'd be very helpful, but equally surprising given that browsers need to work so much harder than Flash given that they're starting with raw text source while Flash does that process in the IDE to generate its bytecode.

I've got no performance benchmarks for you because I've been blocking Flash for a long time. But laptop fans coming on to serve Flash ads are pretty common reports. And there was a recent review of a MacBook Air with a significant reduction in battery life for leaving webpages with Flash open during the test.

But if you want to claim that Flash doesn't have performance issues on a Mac, I'll go ahead and say "okay" because you have obviously looked into the benchmarks more than me.

Of course, but as with any new way of doing things you can't blame the vendor if webmasters don't jump on board immediately. Look at how many web sites are dragging their feet with HTML5 (though in all fairness that probably has as much to do with the W3C's recommendation that HTML5 isn't ready for deployment yet).

Why can't you blame Adobe? I certainly do. They provided the ability to create the video with it's performance issues. They did that for their own benefit. Apple is famous for withholding technology if it doesn't meet their standards despite public outcry.

There can be many good reasons to block any plugin. In fact, I have all JavaScript blocked by default thanks to Firefox's NoScript extension.

Prudent web users also keep their coookies turned off by default as well, and allow such things only when needed as they determine for themselves, not as some web developer chose for them (man, are cookies the most overused web feature or what?).

And the truly savvy user never runs their computer from an admin account except for those few times when it's necessary, spending most of their time in a non-admin account that can't be rooted. OS X is a certified Unix system - why not take full advantage of the security features Unix provides?

These things are a matter of subjective priorities, but I agree it's good practice to err on the side of security.

The problem for me with Flash is that it ignores your privacy and security settings and provides a convoluted and intentionally obscure way of managing it's own.

Disable cookies in your browser? Flash ignores that and sets them any way. Empty your cookies on exit? Ignored. Disable local storage? Flash has it's own storage settings. Empty or limit cache? Ignored by Flash.

And how do you manage Flash's global settings? You go to a website. One that is inaccessible through the Flash context menu. Not even settings.flash.com or something reasonable. And what other major software requires you to google it's settings. Not just where they are, but that they even exist!

Yes, but not for plugins.

Flash could have used CoreVideo (?) or native h.264 playback like any other program on a Mac. They chose not to so they could add additional features to the player.

 

[samcraig]

I didn't read all the posts. The thread is cloned from all the other threads as near as I can tell anyway.

My .02 for those saying "about time" should remember that Adobe didn't always have the same API's and access to Apple's OS until recently.

 

[AppleFan1984]

First, Safari doesn't contain iAds, so I'm not sure where you were going there.

Safari is the browser included with iOS. But you're right: a more complete comparison would also include all the virtual billboards throughout the iOS experience.

Can we expect Apple to provide a built-in means of turning those off?

 

[BaldiMac]

Safari is the browser included with iOS. But you're right: a more complete comparison would also include all the virtual billboards throughout the iOS experience.

Can we expect Apple to provide a built-in means of turning those off?

If you had read the rest of my post, that would not be a reasonable comparison. The complaint was about loading and running programs without user interaction. Not images.

And specific to your claim, ads in third-party software are almost always disclosed in the app description. And, no, we should not expect Apple to modify third-party software that the user has chosen to install.

I didn't read all the posts. The thread is cloned from all the other threads as near as I can tell anyway.

My .02 for those saying "about time" should remember that Adobe didn't always have the same API's and access to Apple's OS until recently.

Your .02 are a clone of many posts in this thread.

 

[AppleFan1984]

How about we avoid the stereotyping and argument grouping and name calling?

That's a fair complaint and I'll admit to suboptimal wording there. My use of "loyalists" wasn't mean to be derogatory; on the contrary, having been an Apple customer and stockholder for two decades I consider myself loyal to the platform as well.

I had intended to use "loyalists" to describe the subset of Mac users who started posting anti-Adobe sentiments about the time Steve posted his "Thoughts on Flash" article. I didn't use "fans" because I was afraid it's too easily misread as "fanboys" or worse, "fanbois", but it seems even in my caution I erred. Mea culpa.

Outside of Mac-focused discussion forums like this, relatively few people have strong opinions on the subject; it never comes up at all at my local Mac user group.

On the contrary, Adobe gets a surprisingly large percentage of their revenue from the Mac community, and browsing around the web it seems that indeed a lot of sites use Flash, many of which are made on Macs, so I think it's fair to say that when we're talking about the sort of anti-Adobe sentiment we read on forums like this we're talking about a relatively small subset of Mac folks.

FWIW, I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or another. Unlike millions of other Mac users, I don't own any Adobe products, I don't have any Flash at my site, and like I said I normally browse the web with both Flash and JavaScript turned off by default.

I think Adobe isn't a perfect company, and no doubt some of the optimizations in Flash Player 10.2 are the result of internal code review, perhaps almost as much as access to the APIs have helped its improved performance. As has been noted here, even JavaScript has gone through many iterations of significant performance improvement, and I'd like to think it's just getting started. It seems reasonable to expect that all such software becomes improved over time.

But I also don't think Adobe is evil, stupid, lazy, or any of the other weird labels I see bandied about. It's just a company. Apple isn't perfect either (man, what were they thinking with that hockey puck mouse, and when will Final Cut become OS X-native?), but I think they make great products and a best-of-breed OS.

I just wish we could all get along.

This "vs" stuff has become a dismaying portrayal of the new Mac community, so different from what it used to be.

 

[AppleFan1984]

The problem for me with Flash is that it ignores your privacy and security settings and provides a convoluted and intentionally obscure way of managing it's own.

Disable cookies in your browser? Flash ignores that and sets them any way. Empty your cookies on exit? Ignored. Disable local storage? Flash has it's own storage settings. Empty or limit cache? Ignored by Flash.

And how do you manage Flash's global settings? You go to a website. One that is inaccessible through the Flash context menu. Not even settings.flash.com or something reasonable. And what other major software requires you to google it's settings. Not just where they are, but that they even exist.

For the few times I use Flash I have most settings off or set to very minimal values. My settings appear to remain in place across sessions; if yours don't you might raise the issue in the Adobe forum to diagnose why that's the case on your system.

True, while context menus are second-nature to most of the computing world they're still relatively new to many Mac users. And of course any plugin can be completely disabled in the browser's Prefs.

Where would you suggest access to those settings be provided if not directly in every instance of the plugin?

 

[BigMac2]

This "vs" stuff has become a dismaying portrayal of the new Mac community, so different from what it used to be.

If Ill talk for my self, my argue was not about Adobe vs Apple at all, the Mac community has nothing to do with it. I seen so many tech overtime like hypercard, ResEdit, DOS, Windows 3, FutureSplash, Gopher, Archies, common people doesn't care about which tech they use has long they get the job done. The big problem is when tech industry doesn't know when to let go and move on. The time who we need external plugins to spice up the web is near end as browsers gain those functionality, it's the only way to make the web work outside the PC (Personnal Computer) world.

Why Apple fans are more concern than the others? Because iOS was the first mobile OS outside the PC world to pretend to have a desktop class browser and internet access, and that will never be done with flash, Adobe can't pretend the same performance and the same functionality on all platform, Take only the rollover cursor function that many navigating flash elements use and can't be handle with touch screen input.

 

[BaldiMac]

Outside of Mac-focused discussion forums like this, relatively few people have strong opinions on the subject; it never comes up at all at my local Mac user group.

FlashBlock and BetterPrivacy (both anti-Flash-focused extensions) get over 40,000 downloads a week each from Firefox users. An amazing number considering most people have no idea about the negatives of Flash. Or even what Flash is.

And that doesn't count the people who use Adblock to block flash content.

I don't think it's isolated to Mac discussion forums.

As far as your "Thoughts on Flash" comment. Sure, you have your irrational Mac supporters. And your irrational Adobe supporters. And, by far the largest group, your irrational Microsoft supporters. But why try and group them with all the other rational discussion around Flash?

I saw the response to Job's "Thoughts on Flash" for the most part as a rallying of existing anti-Flash sentiment rather than a parroting of "Jobs said bad things about it so it must be evil." You had just as many people in these forums denouncing Job's comments as an irrational rant filled with lies, as you had irrational fans starting up the "Adobe is evil" campaign.

 

[BaldiMac]

For the few times I use Flash I have most settings off or set to very minimal values. My settings appear to remain in place across sessions; if yours don't you might raise the issue in the Adobe forum to diagnose why that's the case on your system.

True, while context menus are second-nature to most of the computing world they're still relatively new to many Mac users. And of course any plugin can be completely disabled in the browser's Prefs.

Where would you suggest access to those settings be provided if not directly in every instance of the plugin?

You're missing my point. My browser has a setting to disable cookies. Flash ignores that setting. It has it's own settings that were hidden from the user until Flash 10.1.

To get to the global settings, you had to go to a website if you happened to find out that it even existed. It was not available from the context menu (where other Flash Player settings were located.)

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html

Macromedia? Seriously?! How would a user trust that!

Similarly, Flash ignores Private Browsing mode, local storage settings, and cache settings set in the preference panel of the browser.

And Flash cookies and storage are accessible across all the browsers on your system that access the plugin.