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Steve Jobs' Wall Street Journal Visit Reportedly Included Arguments Against Flash

ChazUK said:
How is the framerate tho? It's no good having low CPU usage when it's rendering at 3-4 frames per second.
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Safari is choppy, Google Chrome runs very smoothly. I'm supposing:

a)Google Chrome runs a newer Webkit build

or

b)The animations were optimized for Chrome.

Or both.

Anybody wanna try with Webkit nightly?

EDIT: Same thing with Webkit. Indeed optimized for Chrome specifically.
 
ChazUK said:
You have 8 cores! No fair! :(

(will try it in a sec.) :p

Runs better on Flash (Performance wise). VIDEO: http://chazclout.co.uk/a/DoF.3gp

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Funny I see the same thing in comparison with HTML 5(maybe its better if it used WebGL).

Performance wise, flash runs better because its using all the cores.:D But for mobile CPU efficiency it should rely on GPU's vector processing instead.

I have nothing against Flash as a development environment (see my Dock Icons). In fact all flash based websites, and my projects including Papervision3D run them very smoothly. I just can't guarantee everyone will have the same experience thats why I look for alternatives such as Unity and WebGL from Papervision.
 
An interesting perspective from gadgeteer.com

It Doesn’t Support Flash, Why It Doesn’t Make Sense To, and Why You Shouldn’t Care
While the iPad name has been the dead horse of choice for the general public to beat, tech critics seem to have agreed to target a different perceived shortcoming: the lack of Flash support in the Safari browser. They go on and on about how so much of the world wide web is dependent on Flash, and how this is a crippling omission in the browser. Apple has long been criticized for the lack of Flash support on the iPhone, how DARE they impose this same restriction on the iPad? Are they insane?

Well, no. They’re not.

One point that many tech critics — especially those that do not use a Mac on a day-to-day basis — have overlooked is that Flash is and has always been the bane of web browsing on a Mac. Flash for Macs is a notorious resource hog, and is infamously unstable. It’s to the point where people have written Safari plugins specifically to prevent Flash applets from loading (ClickToFlash and BashFlash, just to name a couple). So, if Adobe can’t deliver a fast, slim, stable version of Flash for OS X, why would anyone believe that they could deliver a better version for the iPad or iPhone, both of which are running what is effectively a stripped-down version of OS X on far less powerful hardware?

Even if Adobe was somehow able to pull off this logic-defying feat, Apple would still have reason to block it anyway. When you think about it, there are really only four reasons that people incorporate Flash on a website, and none of them are compelling reasons for Apple to support it:

to provide giant animated and interactive menus. Every web designer and developer worth his or her salt knows that you simply do not build a website that requires a specific plugin in order to navigate, or you are going to alienate a significant portion of your audience. This was a best practice that was established back when few browsers supported Flash or other media plugins, and has become important again now that mobile browsing is starting to comprise a larger portion of WWW traffic. Any website that doesn’t offer an alternative to Flash navigation is a website that isn’t worth visiting.
to deliver media such as video and music. YouTube and Vimeo have recently started moving to HTML5 instead of Flash, and odds are that once the big boys do it, the smaller players will follow. Why keep investing in Flash development tools when all you really need is built right into the HTML spec? And why would Apple want to do anything extra to support a technology that is losing ground to a free alternative?
to provide dynamically updating content (maps that track an object in real time, etc). Again, this sort of thing can be provided with other technologies, such as HTML5 and AJAX.
to provide interactive content (read: games). If you look through the iTunes app store, you’ll find more than a few games that are basically ports of Flash games that you can play for free on the internet. Clearly, it’s in Apple’s best financial interest to keep people buying those apps from the app store, since Apple gets a cut of each of those sales. And if the popularity and potential profits of the app store are enough to convince budding developers to skip writing Flash games and jump straight into the iPhone/iPad SDK, all the better for Apple… and all the less reason for Apple to bother with Flash.
And even ignoring all of those issues and considerations, there is one large question that has yet to be answered: how would Flash even work on an iPhone or iPad? Interaction with Flash applets boils down to a set of “events” that register with the applet, such as a mouse click, hovering over an item with the cursor, clicking and dragging, etc. How exactly would Flash be able to read a “hover” event, when there is no mouse pointer with which to hover? How would Flash distinguish a user swiping to scroll the page from a user clicking and dragging in a Flash applet? The answer is that there is no answer. Flash applets would either have to completely take over the browser, or interaction with them on a iPad or iPhone would become so significantly different from interacting with them on a desktop browser that it would feel awkward and downright alien. In short, Flash was designed to be used with a mouse and physical keyboard, two things that the iPhone and iPad lack; even if Flash *could* run on an iPad, it wouldn’t be usable for the majority of the things that people do with it.

Few tears should be shed over the lack of Flash on the iPad. A great many of us have gotten along just fine for the past few years without Flash on our iPhones, and besides, all signs point to Flash going the way of RealPlayer. Don’t forget that Adobe is going to get little support from Microsoft in keeping the de facto web application framework crown; MS is doing everything they can to usurp that title with their own Silverlight product.
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I personally dont care, but many seem to...
 
IntelliUser said:
Safari is choppy, Google Chrome runs very smoothly. I'm supposing:

a)Google Chrome runs a newer Webkit build

or

b)The animations were optimized for Chrome.

Or both.

Anybody wanna try with Webkit nightly?
Click to expand...
Did you watch my video? I'm using Chrome myself on 10.6.2 on my 2.4GHz iMac.
chrome.png

Framerate is VERY choppy. Perhaps it's an OSX issue?
 
IntelliUser said:
Safari is choppy, Google Chrome runs very smoothly. I'm supposing:

a)Google Chrome runs a newer Webkit build

or

b)The animations were optimized for Chrome.

Or both.

Anybody wanna try with Webkit nightly?
Click to expand...


I just tried it with the latest WebKit (r54921), and its much faster. But not as fast as the Flash version.

I'll try to post a comparison video.
 
MoreMaypo said:
The Flash-haters will conveniently ignore this. Until there are ACTUAL AUTHORING TOOLS equivalent to Flash CS* available for graphics/animation professionals who use Flash ALL THE TIME for content such as this, I'm going to pay very little attention to this HTML5 craze.

I generally like Apple's leading edge and innovative model, but now I'm starting to get sick of Jobs' ego.
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I hear ya. While the HTML5 canvas examples I have seen are amazing, they don't come close to touching this site:

http://ecodazoo.com/
 
Speedy2 said:
Actually, DOCX (aka OOXML, the "new" DOC) and PDF are both ISO standards. Everyone can write software for it. Can everyone write software for SWF? no.
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I said: "SWF is a DE FACTO standard". If you don't know what a de facto standard is, please look it up. I assure you it's not synonymous with ISO standard. PDF and DOC were de facto standards loooooooooooooooong before they became ISO standards.
Sorry you lose.
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Until you learn to read posts you respond to, you're disqualified from competing.
 
IntelliUser said:
Could be. Unfortunately my Mac is getting repaired. Anybody else wanna try?
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Tried it on Leopard on my Hackintosh and Chrome and it runs slow. Rebooted it into Ubuntu 9.10 and ran it (Chrome again) and it's FAR smoother. :cool:

I retract all my pessimism from this point onwards. Impressive! :D

EDIT: does that confirm that this is a Mac issue again?
 
ChazUK said:
Tried it on Leopard on my Hackintosh and Chrome and it runs slow. Rebooted it into Ubuntu 9.10 and ran it (Chrome again) and it's FAR smoother. :cool:

I retract all my pessimism from this point onwards. Impressive! :D

EDIT: does that confirm that this is a Mac issue again?
Click to expand...

Looks so. But why would it run slower on a Mac?
 
ChazUK said:
I have no idea to be honest but here is a little vid of it: http://chazclout.co.uk/a/video-2010-02-19-17-54-23.3gp

OSX is running on my iMac 2.4GHz and Chrome 5.0.307.9
Ubuntu is running on a Pentium Dual Core 1.6GHz and Chrome 5.0.307.7

The performance difference considering the huge leap in spec on my iMac is a mistery.
Click to expand...

You know what's impressive? That your video takes ages to load and freezes my web browser on this netbook, yet it runs the HTML5 video smoothly and better than your iMac.:eek::D

Anyway, I'll try to contact the developer, maybe they've got some more info?
 
IntelliUser said:
You know what's impressive? That your video takes ages to load and freezes my web browser on this netbook, yet it runs the HTML5 video better than your iMac.:eek::D

Anyway, I'll try to contact the developer, maybe they've got some more info?
Click to expand...

ROFL. :D It's 3GP video straight off my Nexus One so I doubt it's formatted correctly for streaming. I think it downloads the whole file before playing hence the freeze (my iMac is the same. :p).

EDIT: When it does work properly I am impressed tho so thanks for sharing the link. :cool:
 
ChazUK said:
ROFL. :D It's 3GP video straight off my Nexus One so I doubt it's formatted correctly for streaming. I think it downloads the whole file before playing hence the freeze (my iMac is the same. :p).

EDIT: When it does work properly I am impressed tho so thanks for sharing the link. :cool:
Click to expand...

That explains the second mystery :D

From the author's website:

"Whenever I work on a html/javascript experiment I usually test it on Chrome. Once I'm done, I test it on Firefox and Opera. There is no Safari for Linux so I don't have an easy way for testing it so I usually assume it works as it's very similar to Chrome."

Maybe that's related in some way to the poor Mac performance.
 
jeznav said:
I just tried it with the latest WebKit (r54921), and its much faster. But not as fast as the Flash version.

I'll try to post a comparison video.
Click to expand...

Here is a comparison video:


Safari 4.0.4 using HTML5 / Webkit r54921 HTML5 / Safari using Flash


Conclusion? Flash wins per framerate.
 
Well, hulu is switching to a paid model on the iPad.

Bend over, Steve Jobs worshipers. Here come the fees. Remember to yell "thank you Steve!" as you empty your wallets into the collection baskets for the Church of Jobs.
 
PeterQVenkman said:
Well, hulu is switching to a paid model on the iPad.

Bend over, Steve Jobs worshipers. Here come the fees. Remember to yell "thank you Steve!" as you empty your wallets into the collection baskets for the Church of Jobs.
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What's Steve Jobs got to do with that? Hulu has been trying for ages to monetize itself.
 
Otaviano said:
What's Steve Jobs got to do with that? Hulu has been trying for ages to monetize itself.
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Well, ebook prices are going up too, since Apple is going agency with the publishers, thus screwing Amazon and pushing prices up.

I personally think the iPad has too many shortcomings to be a success, including lack of Flash, and walled off content supply (you can't order from other ebook stores, for instance).

Sorry, but only an idiot can be happy to pay $1.99 or $.99 to watch an episode on a 9.7" screen, when the same episode is available for free elsewhere (but in Flash).

On Flash in Safari: Safari runs Flash much worse than any other browser, both on Mac and Windows. Worse than IE8, worse than Firefox 3.6, worse than Camino, worse than Chrome (even though both are Webkit). Safari has good UI, but it sucks as a browser - it has issues with Java as well.

And Safari is a hog not only when running Flash. Check you CPU and memory, then compare to Firefox and Chrome. Since I've switched to Firefox as default, I have not had a single crash, and no Java or Flash problems.
 
macUser2007 said:
Well, ebook prices are going up too, since Apple is going agency with the publishers, thus screwing Amazon and pushing prices up.
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Poor Amazon. Doesn't get to be a monopsony anymore.

I personally think the iPad has too many shortcomings to be a success, including lack of Flash, and walled off content supply (you can't order from other ebook stores, for instance).
Click to expand...

Yes you can.
 
ChazUK said:
I'm assuming they only hit 100% because they aren't optimised for multiple core CPU's?
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That's what I was thinking. Even Flash player 9 offered multicore support. If HTML5 gets multicore support, I'd guess everyone will complain why some demos are shooting up through the roof. :D

But if Webkit supports this in the future, it might be a good thing especially if it leverage its vector processing on mobile GPUs. Heck, why not just use WebGL? (oh wait..nv)
 
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