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dsnort

macrumors 68000
Jan 28, 2006
1,904
68
In persona non grata
Posted this in another thread. Could be wrong, but I think it explains some things.

"Now, I'm no tech guy, so someone correct me if I'm wrong, but after doing some reading on this, here is what I believe the issue is.

Most programs achieve hardware acceleration by manipulating the OS's API's. On Windows, Flash achieves hardware acceleration by directly accessing the CPU and RAM, and that is the way Adobe would prefer to work with both Mac OS and Linux. The problem is that both Mac OS and Linux are based on Unix, which doesn't allow any program that level of access. So Adobe works on Mac and Linux through plug ins, and poorly written ones at that. Remember when the first Flash on iPhones argument started? Adobe responded that Flash would be better if Apple would work with them, which I take to mean "Give us CPU level access". Steve Jobs said "FU you security hole creating inbred sons of bidecimal water buffalo!"

Like I said, I'm not a tech guy, just seems to be how it came down.
 

Consultant

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
13,314
34
Apple says: to interact with certain functions you have to use official hooks just like everyone else.

Adobe flash team: no way, we rather keep it crappy than do it the right way.

This is possibly the only thing I hate about OS X... I wish my macbook wouldn't sound like it's gonna take off just because of youtube or a flash game.

It's Adobe's fault.
 

smartalic34

macrumors 6502a
May 16, 2006
976
60
USA
Where things are now, Steve Jobs is trying to relegate Flash to the past, what with the iPhone and iPad not supporting it. Jobs wants HTML5 as the new standard, and even if Adobe cleaned up their act, Apple would probably ignore it, as Jobs has his heart set on killing Flash. So as to why Flash sucks on Mac OS X so much? Adobe doesn't care enough, and Apple doesn't care that Adobe doesn't care :rolleyes:
 

hakuryuu

macrumors 6502
Sep 30, 2007
350
6
Lomita, CA
I must be special or something, but flash works just fine on my MBP and Mac Pro. Sure it uses obscene amounts of cpu (more so on the MBP than MP) but I haven't had much of an issue. However on Linux it does have a noticeably slow frame rate. Is it better on Windows compared to both? Yep. Would be nice if Adobe would fix this.
 

smartalic34

macrumors 6502a
May 16, 2006
976
60
USA
I must be special or something, but flash works just fine on my MBP and Mac Pro. Sure it uses obscene amounts of cpu (more so on the MBP than MP) but I haven't had much of an issue. However on Linux it does have a noticeably slow frame rate. Is it better on Windows compared to both? Yep. Would be nice if Adobe would fix this.

I haven't had too many issues with Flash either (but the couple of Safari crashes were Flash-related. However, like you said, Flash uses an obnoxious amount of cpu, and this is a big issue for me, especially while I'm mobile with my MBP. This is a bigger issue for the iPhone and iPad, as Jobs has said; including it would bring down battery life significantly.
 

Azathoth

macrumors 6502a
Sep 16, 2009
659
0
As a newcomer to mac, I've always wondered what the big complaint was about Flash- until I got a Mac.

Just playing (BBC) audio on my Core i5 MBP uses about 9% (Flash Gala preview) CPU. On my Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz Win7 (Flash 10.1.53) CPU usage is <1%.

I think that Adobe might use DirectX/DirectSound APIs under Windows to get better performance, I don't know if similar APIs are available under Cocao (OS X)?
 

steerpikegg

macrumors member
Nov 19, 2007
67
0
The thing is, why does a small application (which started as a browser plugin) require access directly to hardware to do something as simple as a kid's game?

An Atari VCS gave better performance at moving 2d sprites around in the 80s than flash does on my £2.5k mac pro with literally 10,000,000 times more RAM and probably even more times that in processing power.

Software is just getting so bloated these days, and I suspect poor programming practice is the reason that there is still no proper 64 bit version of what is essentially a tiny piece of software. Hell, 64 bit has been around years and years on consumer PCs.
 

Azathoth

macrumors 6502a
Sep 16, 2009
659
0
The thing is, why does a small application (which started as a browser plugin) require access directly to hardware to do something as simple as a kid's game?

An Atari VCS gave better performance at moving 2d sprites around in the 80s than flash does on my £2.5k mac pro with literally 10,000,000 times more RAM and probably even more times that in processing power.

Software is just getting so bloated these days, and I suspect poor programming practice is the reason that there is still no proper 64 bit version of what is essentially a tiny piece of software. Hell, 64 bit has been around years and years on consumer PCs.

Because that Atari game was doing some amazing tricks with the limited HW and was no doubt written in assembler. I get your point, but now SW engineers are almost completely isolated from the underlying hardware - e.g. on the iPhone you have you use Apple API calls and program in C (and dialects there of) or JavaScript.

This has security (and compatibility) advantages, but doesn't help speed...

Perhaps they don't want 64bit in order to ensure there is no code divergence - all the 64bit OSes support 32bit apps anyway,
 

steerpikegg

macrumors member
Nov 19, 2007
67
0
I get your point, but assembler on a 2mhz cpu vs a mid level language on a 3.0 ghz cpu (and that's put very simply) there could be no excuses made that flash's poor performance is due to having to write to api's and program in C.

I can run emulators within emulators within vms that run better.
 

Dammit Cubs

macrumors 68020
Jul 31, 2007
2,106
691
geez, how much flash do you guys use?

There are other things in this world..other than flash, hulu and youtube.
 

applevx

macrumors member
Mar 10, 2009
67
0
Flash sucks on OS X, we know that.

Flash sucks on Windows, yeah we gonna know that too. :D
 

poppe

macrumors 68020
Apr 29, 2006
2,242
51
Woodland Hills
Any time I use flash, my computer CPU percentage is always around 90-95%, while hitting 100% when a commercial is about to come up (Hulu).
 

munkees

macrumors 65816
Sep 3, 2005
1,027
1
Pacific Northwest
My nearly-new iMac (2.8GHz C2D "Extreme") would have exceeded supercomputer specs just a few years ago; it is still pretty darn close to state-of-the-art. It can play-back HD video and render 3D animations at amazing framerates without even a hiccup. It is an incredibly fast machine. Why, then, does displaying a few tiny four-colour Flash ads on my local newspaper's website bring it to its knees? Using up to 38% of my CPU? And yes, this is with the most recent 10.0.22.87 Flash release.

If anyone reading this works for Adobe, you should be ashamed of yourself, your co-workers, and especially your employer. If this is the best Adobe can do, it's pitiful. :apple:

I seeing the same thing, it seems to be getting worse, I mainly have 30 websites opened at a time between 5 windows and multiple tabs, just seems to be very very slow now days and flash crashes about 2 a day. Glad it does not crash safari with it.
 

poppe

macrumors 68020
Apr 29, 2006
2,242
51
Woodland Hills
Ever since I upgraded to Leopard my computer has ran like it was half the power it originally was. When I upgraded to snow leopard, it has a hard time opening two tabs in Safari.

Could the fact that my MBP 17" which has a 64 bit capable processor and a mother board that is only 32 bit capable. Maybe that's a stupid question, but having firefox, mail and safari running (not even open) will bring my computer to a halt.
 

kasakka

macrumors 68020
Oct 25, 2008
2,360
1,060
Adobe is not a company that does Mac software, they're a company that ports Windows software. Just look at the whole Creative Suite - all UI elements are poorly faked, the whole UI is built with Flash components (you can even find references to Flash inside Illustrator panels...), it follows none of OSX's app design guidelines.

If you add to this that their developers are not that good based on the absurd bugs (like Photoshop crashing when opening more than one file because I had a network printer selected as default) and lack of attention to detail that plagues pretty much every release (both Windows and OSX), you have ****** software.

It's a real shame because Adobe started with some killer products, but I think the people making them have been completely swapped at some point because they just keep shoehorning in new features but not fitting them nicely into the UI or fixing the old ones.

It's unfortunate that moving to HTML5 will take a long time, until then we just have to suffer with Flash.
 
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