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Wow am I glad Flash is NOT on iOS

*LTD* said:
Love him or hate him, Steve was right.

Performance is either garbage or it kills your battery, or both.
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I have neither of those issues on my G2, which mind you, is not the fastest Android device.

*LTD* said:
Flash is *not* a uniform experience across all devices. This is the main problem.
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Neither is any application on any device. But most of the latest Android phones have no problem whatsoever running Flash, and I've never noticed any real battery drain increase.

Jobs doesn't want Flash on Apple phones and iPads simply because Flash is a content delivery system. I figured most of you knew this, but I guess not. Apple wants to completely control what you install and run on your iPad.
 
This debate again... really?

Love it, hate it, or indifferent, the reality is that technology constantly evolves. It's humorous to see people defend flash, as though it were except from any change and required to continue to be used on the web for the next 100 years.

I'd say that between Hulu+, Netflix, TED, YouTube, ABCPlayer and WatchESPN, my needs for video consumption are served. If that wasn't the case, then I would likely be wondering why flash isn't available. But because I can view the content I want, as a consumer I could care less what technology it is being delivered by.
 
Flash works butter smooth on my galaxy s.

SteveAbootman said:
This debate again... really?

Love it, hate it, or indifferent, the reality is that technology constantly evolves. It's humorous to see people defend flash, as though it were except from any change and required to continue to be used on the web for the next 100 years.

I'd say that between Hulu+, Netflix, TED, YouTube, ABCPlayer and WatchESPN, my needs for video consumption are served. If that wasn't the case, then I would likely be wondering why flash isn't available. But because I can view the content I want, as a consumer I could care less what technology it is being delivered by.
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Also humorous to see people bash flash. Just as stupid.
 
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ani23 said:
Adobe could have easily made a version of flash which was more compatible for touch based devices.

The problem is that allowing that would let people totally circumvent the appstore for casual games, music etc. And that probably is the biggest reason why flash was a no go right from the start.
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I think you may have actually stumbled onto something here. There's no rational reason to keep Flash off iOS devices if it can be OFF by default. Of course Apple is all about choice... Apple's choice.
 
I certainly feel lik simply having the ability to turn it on or off would have been the simple answer, if it is a performance issue. They could have even left it off by default so it would not harm the average consumer (with speed and battery). This being said, I do agree with several of you, this topic is getting a little old. It's not going to happen. Why keep agonizing over it?
 
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NateJamesMeyers said:
Same here. and the OP is talking about the nexus s here. thats the stock android experience and is known to be the smoothest. hes gotta be lying.
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Lol i am not lying and i do have flash set to on demand, but as soon as you click one element it loads all of them and bogs down badly. I am now using opera mobile for my browser if i want to see flash as it will load one element at a time and i prefer it to the other browsers (except for i wish every browser didnt need 3 clicks to select a bookmark) and for general browsing i use opera mini because my data plan compresses images horribly and opera bypasses that (and their compression looks better). The stock browser on the nexus s even with flash disabled isnt as smooth as an iphone 3g
 
I must admit I can't see any dramatic turn away from flash based sites.

Sites that did not work over a year ago when I bought my 1st iPad still don't work today.

It might seem they are just waiting it out till devices are out that can run flash rather then trying to change their site, especially when their may be nothing official to change to site to yet.

As tablet speeds, CPU and GPU increase year on year, the argument against running Flash due to it's power requirements are going to be less and less justifiable.

If a 10 years old PC with a mediocre graphics card can run flash sites ok, then perhaps a tablet from this year, next year or the year after will be able to run it just as well.
 
I've never had those issues either. I still liked the option of it just being a download away if I needed it, rather than having no option at all.
 
newdeal said:
Lol i am not lying and i do have flash set to on demand, but as soon as you click one element it loads all of them and bogs down badly. I am now using opera mobile for my browser if i want to see flash as it will load one element at a time and i prefer it to the other browsers (except for i wish every browser didnt need 3 clicks to select a bookmark) and for general browsing i use opera mini because my data plan compresses images horribly and opera bypasses that (and their compression looks better). The stock browser on the nexus s even with flash disabled isnt as smooth as an iphone 3g
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lol I know for a fact that you're a lying now. just stop it bro
 
Is Flash the right direction to take the web or video on the web? No matter how efficient Adobe can make Flash run, ultimately it will always belong to Adobe. Why Apple hate Flash—the number one reason they hate it—is because Flash ran horribly on Macs for many years. It was slow, ugly, inefficient, and crashed (and still crashes) frequently and Apple could do nothing about it. Apple were at the whim of Adobe to update the Flash plugin on Macs and Adobe (and Macromedia) didn't care about updating the plugin on Macs because Macs had a smaller marketshare. As both a Mac user and an ex-Flash developer, it's the most frustrating thing in the world to have to sign a freaking Internet petition to Adobe to fix Flash, so I can't imagine how Apple felt about this. It's echoed in the Linux community, where Adobe don't even give a damn.

Adobe have very recently begun improving Flash, making it efficient, and fixing the plugin on Macs. So they are working hard to prove it can be a good technology (I wonder why it's just now that they're taking an interest?) but you're still relying on Adobe for the future of interactivity and video on the Internet. I don't trust them. Apple won't ever trust them again. Should you?

But HTML5 is not controlled by any single company. Anyone from Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, down to a clever guy sitting in his basement have complete access to HTML5 and improving how well it plays back video and other content, and it would stay that way forever.
 
Im glad I don't even have the choice to run flash on an iPad. Oh lordy what will I do if I was given the option to run flash. Thank you steve because I don't even need the choice.
 
NateJamesMeyers said:
Same here. and the OP is talking about the nexus s here. thats the stock android experience and is known to be the smoothest. hes gotta be lying.
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Well stock android experience isn't the pinnacle of smoothness. There is a big difference in hardware that differentiates galaxy s ii from nexus s.

Eventhough gs ii can play 1080p flash clips smoothly, does not mean it's going to churn through every flash content without an issue. I've had core i7 machines struggle to play poorly made high def flash video clips.

I use pulse viewer to browse through many contents and i do run into handful of posts where html5 counter part is not available
 
EssentialParado said:
But HTML5 is not controlled by any single company...
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This is the key point. In a way, Flash is underutilized: I wrote a small flash thing to put on my home page years ago, with some nice motion, transforms and mouseovers. The Macromedia authoring tool provided a wealth of animation features and effects, but no one uses that stuff to speak of any more. Using Flash as a video delivery wrapper seems like little more than overkill when its real original purpose was to create animations and effects. Most of what Flash is used for now is stuff that you can do just as well with JS, so why bother?

Only Adobe can improve Flash performance. Apple, Mozilla, MS and any other browser developer can improve the performance of the JS alternatives. Which would you prefer?
 
Piggie said:
I must admit I can't see any dramatic turn away from flash based sites.

Sites that did not work over a year ago when I bought my 1st iPad still don't work today.

It might seem they are just waiting it out till devices are out that can run flash rather then trying to change their site, especially when their may be nothing official to change to site to yet.

As tablet speeds, CPU and GPU increase year on year, the argument against running Flash due to it's power requirements are going to be less and less justifiable.

If a 10 years old PC with a mediocre graphics card can run flash sites ok, then perhaps a tablet from this year, next year or the year after will be able to run it just as well.
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The margin for error for a PC is much wider, even for a 10-year old one with a mediocre graphics card. PCs are kept plugged in all the time so things like minimizing power consumption aren't as critical. The supply of power is practically unlimited.

For a tablet, however, those kinds of things (e.g. power consumption) suddenly come to the forefront of design.
 
I have a Samsung Galaxy S and I had the same experience with flash, it's slow with video playback and it drains the battery. But I also had some very pleasant experience with it when I was looking for Restaurants that have a lot of Flash websites. I'd rather have it in that situation than not.
Android doesn't have a seamless experience at all like apple but it's pretty useful sometimes
 
NateJamesMeyers said:
Same here. and the OP is talking about the nexus s here. thats the stock android experience and is known to be the smoothest. hes gotta be lying.
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Whether it's stock or skinned is negligible in comparison to the fact that the SGSII has a 1.2GHz dual core CPU and the Nexus S has a 1GHz single core. Might want to get your facts straight before making insulting remarks.
 
AdrianK said:
Whether it's stock or skinned is negligible in comparison to the fact that the SGSII has a 1.2GHz dual core CPU and the Nexus S has a 1GHz single core. Might want to get your facts straight before making insulting remarks.
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and there is quite a bit of difference between A8 and A9 design
 
EssentialParado said:
... It was slow, ugly, inefficient, and crashed (and still crashes) frequently and Apple could do nothing about it. Apple were at the whim of Adobe to update the Flash plugin on Macs...
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That was true several years ago, but Adobe donated the ActionScript Virtual Machine (the tech that runs SWFs) to the Mozilla Foundation. It's open source now. Anyone can make a Flash Player (much like the PDF spec is now open, and anyone can make a PDF viewer)

And just like Apple made their own PDF viewer, they could make their own Flash Player (if they really wanted to, and thought they could do it any better).
 
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UTclassof89 said:
...Anyone can make a Flash Player...
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Not really. The Open Screen Project is woefully incomplete and is missing key things like the video player specifications. As it stands right now it's more of a PR initiative than a viable base for a Flash replacement.
 
err404 said:
Not really. The Open Screen Project is woefully incomplete and is missing key things like the video player specifications. As it stands right now it's more of a PR initiative than a viable base for a Flash replacement.
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I've heard that claim a number of times but can't find any evidence of it.

The FLV/F4V specification is also part of the Open Screen Project, and there are already 3rd party Flash Video Players (like FlowPLayer and OSflv)
 
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