Opera Software Offers Thoughts on Future of Flash

[m4c1nt05h]

You can't blame Flash for crappy site programming any more than you can blame OS X for crappy third party apps that keep crashing. Flash has issues of its own, sure, but the problems you're describing aren't issues on quality sites. I've played advanced Flash games that never crash, and I've tried others that crash before I've barely begun playing. The problem with unleashing something like Flash that's more or less an application platform, is that quality assurance will never be on par with 'real' software applications. Site designers usually aren't very aware of that aspect, they don't beta test properly, they just throw stuff out there "because it worked on my machine".

are you saying opera, chrome, and firefox are crappy third party apps? safari is not 3rd party, btw.

and have you even been to beatport.com? if not, how can you say it's not a quality site? it's run and maintained by Native Instruments - one of the world's largest audio software companies. i would hardly call beatport a low quality site.

i was just using one good example. it seems that you are assuming i don't visit any other flash site besides beatport. i have trouble on every flash site out there.

 

[wovel]

Guess what? That's exactly what Flash was made for and this is exactly the area where EVERYTHING else completely sucks, including HTML5 (which as of today NO browser actually supports), Ajax, Silverlight, Java and countless other failed approaches.

You want to implement something that's platform and browser independent and that actually works? Flash is the ONLY option. End of discussion.

The problem is Flash sucks at it too and does not provide platform and browser independence. There is one mobile device with full flash and it does not support Flash 10 which is required for more of this dynamic content than not anymore. Flash is dying and adobe killed it , not Apple. Perhaps if they changed their Tos and allowed real development of alternative flash players, and maintained it as an actual standard and not a moving target...

 

[pcharles]

On the Fence Anyone?

"Here at Opera, we are a bunch of me-too guys who cannot make a decision and charge for people to use our sub-standard browser!"

I'm thinking iWeb with HTML 5 at the WWDC!

 

[shingi70]

I thought apenture was apples photoshop

 

[Mac-Michael]

Smart reply. Good for them. Opera is my second favourite browser.

 

[calsci]

Flash id just getting bashed.

 

[50548]

They said what Job said, but in a more lean manner.

AND AGAIN, Jobs predicts the future with uncommon genius; NOW tell me: where are all those PC fanboys that kept repeating in this very forum that Flash would last a billion years, as an almost indestructible monolith?

ADOBE IS DEAD. AND NOBODY CARES.

 

[Anuba]

are you saying opera, chrome, and firefox are crappy third party apps? safari is not 3rd party, btw.

No, that's not even close to what I was saying. Read again.

and have you even been to beatport.com? if not, how can you say it's not a quality site?

I hadn't been to beatport.com before, but I went there now. Here's how bad it is: After 5 minutes I'm still looking at a beatport logo and a blue progress bar that reads 100%. I doesn't move on from there, and there's nothing to click. Fascinating, they actually managed to create a site that freezes before you even get to see it.

it's run and maintained by Native Instruments - one of the world's largest audio software companies.

Ah, that would explain it. I've had my brushes with their bug-infested software and hardware over the years. Their plugins are all quite crash-prone, but their most notoriously unstable product is Kore. The mood on the NI forums among Kore users a couple of years ago was not entirely unlike the mood outside the Greek parliament tonight.

i would hardly call beatport a low quality site.

If the size and success of a company guarantees quality productions, you must be immensely impressed with the quality of Windows, I mean Microsoft is really really REALLY big.

i was just using one good example. it seems that you are assuming i don't visit any other flash site besides beatport. i have trouble on every flash site out there.

I see. I rarely have technical trouble with Flash content, except some video playback implementations. But again, it's not so much about Flash itself. YouTube has never crashed on me but there are other Flash-based video sites that crash all the time.

 

[inkswamp]

I'm glad they finally stepped up and said this. I've been waiting for Opera to get in the fray, even if they've done it quietly.

They've also been screwed around by Adobe not letting the latest version of Flash run on the Wii version of Opera. That means, Hulu and other sites that rely on the latest version of Flash don't even work on the Wii browser which is inexplicable. Yet another glaring example of Adobe's laziness.

 

[WilliamLondon]

"

I get it that Steve Jobs does all the thinking and talking for you? Any opinions - and phrases - of your own on that subject?

"

, said Steve Balmer, who never had an original idea.

 

[inkswamp]

Opera is only saying this because:

1.) It's true
And
2.) So they can keep there app in the app store.

Nonsense. Look into the hassle that Adobe has put Opera and Nintendo through with Flash on the Wii browser. I'm surprised it took Opera this long to speak up.

Here, read up:

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2007/04/13/wii-browser-out-but-why-flash-7-and-not-8-or-9

I don't care what anyone thinks of Steve Jobs, but he's right on the money about Adobe being lazy.

 

[Anuba]

AND AGAIN, Jobs predicts the future with uncommon genius; NOW tell me: where are all those PC fanboys that kept repeating in this very forum that Flash would last a billion years, as an almost indestructible monolith?

ADOBE IS DEAD. AND NOBODY CARES.

Adobe *is* Flash now?

Funny, I could've sworn they have 80 other products. They don't make $4 billion/year on distributing a free plug-in, you know.

The great irony of your peculiar rants is of course that you will be dead long before these companies you manically refer to as DEAD (Microsoft, Adobe, any company that isn't Apple really) will. Imagine the picture; your tombstone, and in the distance behind it you can make out two billboards: "Microsoft Windows 16" and "Adobe Creative Suite 23".

 

[50548]

Adobe *is* Flash now?

Funny, I could've sworn they have 80 other products. They don't make $4 billion/year on distributing a free plug-in, you know.

The great irony of your peculiar rants is of course that you will be dead long before these companies you manically refer to as DEAD (Microsoft, Adobe, any company that isn't Apple really) will. Imagine the picture; your tombstone, and in the distance behind it you can make out two billboards: "Microsoft Windows 16" and "Adobe Creative Suite 23".

A really uncalled for reply, if I may say so...my rants are against companies, not people; no one should ever wish that someone passes before an artificial entity such as Adobe or any other.

So before you spit out stupid remarks of such a bad taste against a person you don't even know, try to think twice or thrice before writing.

 

[karlwig]

"But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera - you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there's a reason for that."

I love eggs!

 

[Anuba]

A really uncalled for reply, if I may say so...my rants are against companies, not people; no one should ever wish that someone passes before an artificial entity such as Adobe or any other.

"Wish?" It has nothing to do with wishing, I'm stating the simple fact that a company of Microsoft's size and global presence is likely to outlive us all. Ford was here 50 years before I was born and it will still be here 50 years after I'm gone. And once I'm gone, I sure hope I've spent my life on something more productive and less futile than chanting "FORD IS DEAD" like a broken record day in and day out.

 

[adomanico18]

prophet jobs?

 

[nooaah]

Adobe is a lot more than just Flash. Don't cry for them when Flash inevitably goes the way of other crap formats like RA.

 

[RalfTheDog]

HTML 5 has it's uses. Flash has it's uses.

HTML 5 is great for video, interactive websites and games.

Flash is good for stupid animated adds that drive you crazy. I do not see these things because I never install flash. Please people, keep using flash for all your stupid advertising.

Thanks.

 

[midwestshooter]

Adobe and Apple

There is no substitute for Photoshop if you are serious about photography.

I just upgraded my Mac Pros in the studio to Photoshop CS5 - and I am blown away by the speed - and the ability to give 8+ GB of RAM to big images.

Back in 1991 I threw out my IBM 486 computers and bought Mac IIfx units (about $8,000 each) - and I did it because there was this new program called Photoshop - it was version 2 when I started, and it came on about 25 floppy disks. Only Macs could do imaging in 1991 - and only Macs could run Photoshop.

So, Apple and Adobe together made digital photography possible - and the rest is history.

I only hope that Apple and Adobe can cut through the crap and get back into a working relationship for those of us who depend on both of them to get our work done.

Adobe pissed off Steve - legitimately - when it announced a few years back that PCs were better for digital work - and that it was their platform of choice. That was when Apple was on the ropes and Steve had his hands full doing a recovery project on his old company. Now Steve is God and he hates Flash.

The results of insult by Adobe may have been iPhoto, Aperture, and Final Cut - all of which take $$$ from Adobe. But, for photography, Photoshop is still King of the Hill - and Apple and Adobe need to work to make their interface as good as it can be for we professional photographers. Unless Apple really wants to be just a cell phone, mobile, song, book and gaming company. How many of those users dropped over $10,000 each at Apple's door last year?

Just my 2 cents.

Dick

 

[Anuba]

Adobe pissed off Steve - legitimately - when it announced a few years back that PCs were better for digital work - and that it was their platform of choice. That was when Apple was on the ropes and Steve had his hands full doing a recovery project on his old company. Now Steve is God and he hates Flash.

The results of insult by Adobe may have been iPhoto, Aperture, and Final Cut - all of which take $$$ from Adobe.

Not sure I agree with the chronology there. Apple was on the ropes in the mid 90's. By the early 2000's they were back on track and Steve was doing Keynote presentations for stuff like the first iMac, the Ti PB etc and I distinctly remember Adobe joining him on stage on several occasions to show off how fast Photoshop was on Mac (=how much faster it was on Mac). This was after Apple's dark era, but before OS X. Then came OS X, and it was somewhere around that time that Adobe announced they would not be porting After Effects and Premiere to OS X. The video guy at the web agency I worked for at the time was a die-hard Mac head and a die-hard After Effects fan, and he was absolutely furious over these antics. In the end he opted for moving to Windows to be able to continue using AE.

So it would appear that the companies were still BFFs in the early 2000's, but then came Final Cut...

 

[E.Lizardo]

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

Thanks Criswell!
LOL

 

[E.Lizardo]

It's funny because it's true. Flash didn't put its mobile pants on early enough. Back when everyone used desktops we never cared about heat, because we weren't sitting on the computers and the fans always sounded like jet engines anyway, whether the machine was idle or rendering Quake at max resolution. Back then, Flash was just for simple animations anyway. But then came all these goddamn developers with their wishlists and soon enough Flash was a full blown programming environment that also happened to do some graphics on the side, rather than the other way around, and the animation timeline was useless because developers love to put everything in a nested mess inside a single keyframe. Now look what you did, you birdie-bracket loving buffoons...


I asked where the Photoshop killer is today. Predictably, I got a vague answer about something that may or may not materialize in the future. Apple? Right, except they don't do Windows software (unless it's called iTunes and lets them sell iPods to PC folk), and as Steve said, the OS X version of Creative Suite accounts for roughly half of Adobe's sales. You can't expect to kill Photoshop if you can only reach half of the customer base.

Gimp? Well let's see. Today it's free, and still isn't as popular as the $999 alternative. Good luck there.

Why did you ask that no one implied there was such a thing TODAY.Straw man much?

 

[E.Lizardo]

I'd rather have Apple code their "Photoshop Killer" from scratch. I mean, let's face it: If you have used Ps for more than, say 5 minutes, GIMP on the Mac SUCKS ***HARD***

I would not be surprised if they had one ready to go.They had x86 OS X ready from 10.0 to keep their options open.It would be smart to be ready if some major software maker pulled support.

 

[TSE]

A little off topic, but Opera browser for Windows is actually my preferred browser. It's UI is amazing and the features it comes with is great.

 

[bigwig]

Stuff like this makes me wonder what the heck TiVo was thinking when it went with a Flash-based UI for its latest settop (TiVo HD).