Google Chrome Set to Gain Integrated Flash Player Plug-In

[MrBlink]

I gotta say the hatred directed at Flash on this site is really weird. I'm an ardent lover of Apple products, and working with PCs is a nightmare in my opinion, but even I have to admit that the main reason for any mac user to have any negative feelings toward Flash is the fact that Macs do a lousy job of running it compared to PCs.

Even so, it does a lot of things that aren't easily accomplished otherwise. Is it true that there are people who are so inconvenienced by it that they disable it entirely? Isn't that kind of like punishing yourself? I mean - where are all these massive Flash apps that are such a drain that they visibly affect your browsing? There's a banner at the top of the page as I write this. Everything is fine.

Oh well. I mean, Flash will go away eventually. Nothing lasts forever. Yippee I think I feel an orgasm coming on.

 

[rhett7660]

The problem with other solutions are their flexibility or more like lack of it. Even more so Flash is provided with great tools for creating rich interactive content which are not available for any other solution.

This is true, so who is to say, Google doesn't create those tools.. or at least get the ball rolling and get some more interest in those other open source projects.

I don't like flash for advertising. I like what can be done with flash. I am hoping the powers to be make it so flash works really well, ie the same as it does on other platforms for OS X. With that happening all of this flash debate can go away.

Until that happens I don't like google now officially supporting it and including it in their browser. I don't care how much or how little they have in market share.

 

[JackAxe]

Thanks for your growing stupidity, Google...one more reason to avoid using Chrome anyway.

GOOGLE IS DEAD.

LOL!!

 

[wcarpenter]

Re...

Its beyond me why Apple can't have open policy on allowing third parties to provide different solutions for pads, phones and pods. After all, the end user can disable or not install the products in the first place if they don't like them. Regarding Flash, it offers great tools that are not available for any other comparable solution.

True, true and true. I think the answer to your first sentence is easily answered in part by your last...Flash provides the ability for developers to create and deploy application level...well...applications, but via a web-browser. Apple wants to maintain absolute control over all the applications that can be deployed on their mobile devices...NOT the sake user's experience, but so that they can collect their 30% from App Store sales (not to mention all in-app purchases). Opening up the iPhone and iPad to Flash applications would allow developers a viable alternative to deploying through the App Store, and thus will eat into Apple's profits...it's a purely greed-driven strategy...

 

[Nuvi]

This is true, so who is to say, Google doesn't create those tools.. or at least get the ball rolling and get some more interest in those other open source projects.

I don't like flash for advertising. I like what can be done with flash. I am hoping the powers to be make it so flash works really well, ie the same as it does on other platforms for OS X. With that happening all of this flash debate can go away.

Until that happens I don't like google now officially supporting it and including it in their browser. I don't care how much or how little they have in market share.

I'm betting my money on Adobe rather then on Google developing industrial strength creative tools. Anyway, Adobe will be supporting HTML5. Problem with many open source products in general is their very slow development, lack of tools or very poor tools aka they suck and you can't create what you want with them. There is no point using some open source dev tool just for the sake of it if some other closed system has better tools, penetration and support. Regarding the advertising, there will be HTML5 adverts as soon as there is enough support for it on browsers. Flash advertising is easy to by pass. Same can't be said with HTML5... (and as everyone knows, Google is advertising) Regarding, Flash speed on Mac, Apple and Adobe really need to sit down together and create a solution which allows optimized code and good hardware support.

 

[MacFly123]

THis is the real reason Steve Jobs started to hate Google. They are integrating flash!

Why..? I thought Google was a leading force in the shift to HTML5.

What is interesting to me is that it seems like since Steve and Eric had their "falling out" Google seems to have shifted from supporting HTML5 and open web standards, to supporting flash on Android, Chrome, etc.

This really seems to be political between Apple and Google. Eric is like determined to really piss Steve off!

 

[hitekalex]

I'll also add that, while I am an avid mac user, and haven't owned a windows PC in quite some time, I am currently boycotting the iPhone and iPad BECAUSE they don't allow the same types of freedoms that Android phones are very quickly beginning to support.

[...]

As for Apple, I can't be the only person they've alienated with their tactics in this matter.

You're not alone. A number of us (long time Apple users) are getting fed up with Apple & their unrelenting desire to control how we use our computers. Boycotting iPhone/iPad is just a first step.

 

[Nuvi]

True, true and true. I think the answer to your first sentence is easily answered in part by your last...Flash provides the ability for developers to create and deploy application level...well...applications, but via a web-browser. Apple wants to maintain absolute control over all the applications that can be deployed on their mobile devices...NOT the sake user's experience, but so that they can collect their 30% from App Store sales (not to mention all in-app purchases). Opening up the iPhone and iPad to Flash applications would allow developers a viable alternative to deploying through the App Store, and thus will eat into Apple's profits...it's a purely greed-driven strategy...

I do agree. Control over media and especially content distribution. Not very popular opinion on this site but logical and most likely the right one.

 

[macintoshtoffy]

Ok, flash may have problems and all that but the mainstream of people know something called "FLASH" and have no idea about the problems or bugs it may have.

Bullcrap, most users do know of the problems with flash but they blame their browser for the problems rather than the plugin itself.When most of the Safari crashes are due to flash - how many people here in their wisdom blame Safari when it is Flash causing the problem? did they look through the core dump or did they just conclude Safari was the cause because Safari crashed? talk about people who think they're IT experts being shown up for the bloviating fools that they really are.

 

[jaw04005]

Wow... this last statement is exactly what my last 10 rants have been about... knowing absolutely NOTHING, being completely wrong, yet still posting worthless dribble.

No, Flash is not bundled with new Mac's and no it is not automatically updated with Safari updates. My goodness. I am trying so hard to refrain from personal attacks, so ya'll don't cry like little children and get me tossed off… again.

Actually, yes it is. When you install Mac OS X, the Flash player plug-in is placed in your /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ folder along with Quicktime, Quartz Composer and other Web plug-ins as part of the default installation.

And Apple periodically through both OS X point and security updates patches the Flash player plug-in even as recently as January 2010.

Directly from Apple’s Web site:

"This document describes Security Update 2010-001, which can be downloaded and installed via Software Update preferences, or from Apple Downloads.

…

Flash Player plug-in

CVE-ID: CVE-2009-3794, CVE-2009-3796, CVE-2009-3797, CVE-2009-3798, CVE-2009-3799, CVE-2009-3800, CVE-2009-3951

Available for: Mac OS X v10.5.8, Mac OS X Server v10.5.8, Mac OS X v10.6.2, Mac OS X Server v10.6.2

Impact: Multiple vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player plug-in

Description: Multiple issues exist in the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, the most serious of which may lead to arbitrary code execution when viewing a maliciously crafted web site. The issues are addressed by updating the Flash Player plug-in to version 10.0.42. Further information is available via the Adobe web site at http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-19.html Credit to an anonymous researcher and Damian Put working with TippingPoints Zero Day Initiative, Bing Liu of Fortinet's FortiGuard Global Security Research Team, Will Dormann of CERT, Manuel Caballero and Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR)."

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4004

 

[rhett7660]

I'm betting my money on Adobe rather then on Google developing industrial strength creative tools. Anyway, Adobe will be supporting HTML5. Problem with many open source products in general is their very slow development, lack of tools or very poor tools aka they suck and you can't create what you want with them. There is no point using some open source dev tool just for the sake of it if some other closed system has better tools, penetration and support. Regarding the advertising, there will be HTML5 adverts as soon as there is enough support for it on browsers. Flash advertising is easy to by pass. Same can't be said with HTML5... (and as everyone knows, Google is advertising) Regarding, Flash speed on Mac, Apple and Adobe really need to sit down together and create a solution which allows optimized code and good hardware support.

Couldn't agree more with this statement. I also hope and agree that Adobe comes out and puts together some nice tools for HTML 5. I also agree with that last statement about sitting down.

 

[bobertoq]

Thanks for your growing stupidity, Google...one more reason to avoid using Chrome anyway.

GOOGLE IS DEAD.

Are you being serious?

As far as I'm concerned, this is a good thing. This feature is turned off by default, by the way.

 

[satcomer]

If Adobe wants to stick to Apple then they should optimize Flash on OS X. I call Flash the Fan Runner on my Mac Book Pro.

 

[rhett7660]

Are you being serious?

As far as I'm concerned, this is a good thing. This feature is turned off by default, by the way.

Why? Not being sarcastic, just wanting to know why it is a big thing? How do you know it is turned off by default? Again just asking. I didn't see it on the first page.

 

[K...]

Clearly Adobe is working hard to improve Flash. Steve Jobs will have some explaining to do when Flash 10.1 is released and it runs well on Apple's competitors' phones. Other companies work closely with Adobe to improve Flash. Apple is stonewalling, plain and simple.

The real reason Jobs bashes Flash all the time is that it's a threat to the App Store. If the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad had Flash, users could run a lot of free games and apps from the browser.

The sad thing about it all, is that Apple is selling the iPad as a the best way to view the Net. It clearly isn't, because a lot of content simply won't be there.

I'm a recent convert to Mac. I own a MacBook Pro, iPhone, and an iPod Touch. They are all great. But I want the option of using Flash on all of them. Just give us the option already Steve!

Apple is seeming more Orwellian every day.

 

[blackhand1001]

Flash is a total resource hog... and on a mobile platform, it is going to suck down battery pretty substantially vs. not having it. I've been working on an HTPC platform for my house and looking at Win7 on a Revo vs. a Mac Mini. My worst case scenario to test is Flash. It takes the CPU utilization through the roof vs. anything else that is running, streaming, or whatever. It is true that Flash is multi-platform, and its an equal pig on all the platforms. If there is a more efficient way to accomplish the same user experience, then I applaud Steve Jobs for taking the unpopular position and trying to push everyone to it.

It is not an equal pig on each platform. Pentium III 500 mhz can play youtube videos fine in both windows and linux, however much newer g4s and intel machines stuggle at the same task. You can even bootcamp your machine to see what I am talking about.

 

[JackAxe]

If Adobe wants to stick to Apple then they should optimize Flash on OS X. I call Flash the Fan Runner on my Mac Book Pro.

I always ask my friend to prove to me that Flash brings on his fan more so than anything else that's similar and he never complies. I'm starting to think he's mental. If Flash is turning on your fans, then pretty much any similar level of CPU usage, good or bad, will bring them on.

Anyways, download this app called Fan Control.

Set the "Base Speed" to about 2000 rpm -- you should not hear this at all.

Set the "Lower Threshold" to 40c.

Also invest in a notebook cooler. The belkin one is great, because it's small enough to fit in a bag and it's quiet.

I use these settings on my Unibody MacBook Pro 17" and my Aluminum 17", which my wife is using now. My Macs "operate" at about 45c. Prior to installing Fan Control they "idled" at over 60c -- WHIC IS TOOO HOT for doing nothing. My i7 920 PC even when clocked at 3.2 Ghz idles at about 37c per core.

I really have to work hard to get my fans to turn on now. Running a 720p youtube vid only peaks my temps at about 50c, so of course my fans don't rev up to the point I can hear them. It also gets rid of the heat in the upper left corner, right above the keyboard, which can get burning hot.

 

[Darkroom]

Why, because Steve Jobs declared that Flash is inherently bad? Listen here.. the world doesn't revolve around Apple, Steve Jobs tantrums, or his little iPhoneOS ecosystem. Chrome is a multi-platform browser and vast majority of Internet users use Flash.

+1

I'm seeing a lot of Microsoft-like moves from Google lately.

I think anyone that deals with technology all day knows that Flash is on its way out, yet Google's brand new browser is going to partner with a 16 year old application that crashes all the time. That's like putting an onboard computer inside of a Ford Pinto. Brilliant.

Flash Player was first released in 1996/1997. to insinuate that the current version of Flash is as old as it's origin is like stating that iTunes 9 is from 2001. i'm confident you're not someone who "deals with technology all day", and for that i'm grateful.

SO, I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I expected more from Google to embrace standards instead of having more proprietary stuff built into Chrome.

I thought Google was about open standards? This is about as opposite as you can get.

Flash is a de facto standard and the Flex SDK is open source.

 

[macUser2007]

I always ask my friend to prove to me that Flash brings on his fan more so than anything else that's similar and he never complies. I'm starting to think he's mental. If Flash is turning on your fans, then pretty much any similar level of CPU usage, good or bad, will bring them on.....

Absolutely true.

I used to use (and still have) a white Mac Book, which would start its fans running whenever it played any video, or run Flash, or open Photoshop file, or even run my fairly packed iPhoto.

I think it was just a design thing, because I have a current 13" and a current 15" Mac Book Pro (the higher end versions of both) and I rarely hear the fan come on - usually if I use it in bed and the covers are obstructing the air-intake, and if I am doing something taxing the CPU.

The CPU in the 13" MBP is not significantly faster than the white MB, yet the fan behavior of the two is very different. Hence my conclusion that it is largely a hardware design thing.

But whatever it is, singling out Flash to blame is just silly.

 

[tkermit]

Absolutely true.

I used to use (and still have) a white Mac Book, which would start its fans running whenever it played any video, or run Flash, or open Photoshop file, or even run my fairly packed iPhoto.

I think it was just a design thing, because I have a current 13" and a current 15" Mac Book Pro (the higher end versions of both) and I rarely hear the fan come on - usually if I use it in bed and the covers are obstructing the air-intake, and if I am doing something taxing the CPU.

The CPU in the 13" MBP is not significantly faster than the white MB, yet the fan behavior of the two is very different. Hence my conclusion that it is largely a hardware design thing.

But whatever it is, singling out Flash to blame is just silly.

I don't quite follow your argument.

Playing back this video in Youtube's HTML5 player makes Safari use up ~25% of my Macbook 1g CPU resources with the Macbook's fan running at a speed that makes one barely able to hear it . The same video, using Youtube's Flash player uses up ~ 70% CPU resources, with the fan quickly running at such a fast speed, that the sound becomes quite annoying.

 

[macintoshtoffy]

Clearly Adobe is working hard to improve Flash. Steve Jobs will have some explaining to do when Flash 10.1 is released and it runs well on Apple's competitors' phones. Other companies work closely with Adobe to improve Flash. Apple is stonewalling, plain and simple.

What a load of crap; Adobe has had over half a decade to fix the problems with their Flash player; they have failed to do so every release. They claimed they never release a version of Flash with known crashes - and yet we have them finally admit that they did ship 10.0 with a known crash which they have since refused to fix up until recently.

They blame Apple for the lack of hooks into video hardware acceleration and yet they ignore the fact that Silverlight on Mac has lower CPU utilisation and doesn't need to use hardware acceleration. Do I want hardware acceleration? sure, but for Adobe to peg all the problems of Flash on that single piece of technology is bloody stupid and idiotic when there are other vendors who are producing great plugins within the need of it.

Btw, when the hell are we going to see Adobe finally fix the crashing bug of Fireworks on Snow Leopard? (when you exit Fireworks on Mac, it crashes) over 100 submissions I've made with their crash reporting tool and it has yet to be fixed.

So please, its time that Adobe got their act together instead of blaming Apple for what it seems to be are thousands of pathetic, useless and poorly trained software engineers who couldn't code their way out of a plastic bag.

The real reason Jobs bashes Flash all the time is that it's a threat to the App Store. If the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad had Flash, users could run a lot of free games and apps from the browser.

Bullcrap - the issue is that if something goes wrong, who gets the blame? Adobe or Apple? I can bloody well assure you, having lived in the Microsoft world before, it is Microsoft who gets the blame for almost everything even if it has nothing to do with them. System crashes - who is to blame? the hardware vendor and their crappy drivers but Microsoft gets the blame. Software incompatibilities with a new version of Windows, whose the blame? the software vendor for failing to provide an update in a timely fashion but Microsoft gets the blame from the clueless legion of halfwitts who blame the biggest target rather than the cause of the problem.

 

[ryrock77]

LOL. Flash has blown up my Google Chrome 3 times in the last 24 hours. Literally breaking it, even with the plugin protection.

I can't say if this is a good or bad thing right now.

I just know flash sucks right now in any browser, including chrome.

Never had my Windows pc or Hackintosh crash because of Flash.

What do you know.....Flash is not dead yet. Google did this for the Window's users not Mac users. I like Window's and Mac's but can't understand this Flash thing. Why no one on either side has fixed this? Apple or Adobe. There has to be a problem with Apples OS system that makes this harder to fix.

One other question is why do PC games play horrible on the Mac? I've heard about people running parallels to run Windows to play PC games and install a better video card that you can't get on the Mac.

We used to compare PC's and Mac's and who performed better. Flash and PC games just don't work well on Mac's.

I don't know why since Mac's are twice as much as PC's.

Can someone give me your take on these two issues? Thanks.

 

[iDarbert]

I've been wondering this myself and after a good ammount of research I believe I found out an acceptable answer for both things

Flash's problem is that Adobe hasn't been doing a stellar job under OSX, true there's no way they'll be able to offer hardware acceleration for H.264 video because of Apple apparently limiting this, but that doesn't excuse the horrible perormance for animation.
Adobe has only recently starting snapping out of it and implementing Core Animation rendering in Flash 10.1, which does improve performance quite a bit

Moving to games, the explanation is twofold; first most of Mac games today come in form of so-called Cider ports, which are actually just Windows binaries in a wine wrapper optimized for gaming (ormerly known as winex). Basically DirectX calls get translated to OpenGl on the fly rather than ported once, this causes non-optimal performance
the second issue Is OpenGl itself, now I don't know all the story but what I do know is that DirectX and OpenGL are two very different beasts, but while directx kept evolving and accomodating game developers OpenGL fell behind.
This is also made worse by the fact that Apple's implementation of OpenGl is not exacty gaming-oriented, fortunately it seems that Apple has been working closely with the folks over at Valve to fox this, which is presumely what happened in 10.6.3

hope it made sense, I apologize for the typos, my WiFi went out an I only have this tiny iPhone to type with

Never had my Windows pc or Hackintosh crash because of Flash.

What do you know.....Flash is not dead yet. Google did this for the Window's users not Mac users. I like Window's and Mac's but can't understand this Flash thing. Why no one on either side has fixed this? Apple or Adobe. There has to be a problem with Apples OS system that makes this harder to fix.

One other question is why do PC games lay horrible on the Mac? I've heard about people running parallels to run Windows to play PC games and install a better video card that you can't get on the Mac.

We used to compare PC's and Mac's and who performed better. Flash and PC games just don't work well on Mac's.

I don't know why since Mac's are twice as much as PC's.

Can someone give me your take on these two issues? Thanks.

 

[ryrock77]

Thanks for your reply.

Performance between PC's and Mac's used to be close in every way. Given these two problems and it makes me wonder why. Gamers almost have to go PC and Flash has never worked well on Mac's.

I do think that Jobs looked at Flash 6-7 years ago and decided that Apple would go against Flash and compete head to head in two areas. Video (QT) as web standard, Apple lost this one and Games (app's on iPhone) against Flash games, Apple won this one so far.

Makes you wonder about Apple's motives on Flash.

Don't forget Apple's Final Cut has blown Adobe's Premier Pro away for many years. I like Premier Pro better but that's not standard in the video industry.

 

[bobertoq]

Why? Not being sarcastic, just wanting to know why it is a big thing? How do you know it is turned off by default? Again just asking. I didn't see it on the first page.

Because Adobe Flash Player will be updated and the user doesn't have to do anything. This is good for security.

To enable the built-in version of Flash, run Chrome with the --enable-internal-flash command line flag.

From the last paragraph in the second link. It may, however, be enabled by default once it reaches a stable build. I'm sure one will be able to turn it off. If not, that is silly of Google, but most people wouldn't want or need to turn it off, anyway.