

Jobs: Flash would murder the iPad. Really now, let’s be realistic - fjabre
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/02/18/jobs-flash-will-murder-the-ipad-really-now-lets-be-realistic/

======
jrockway
_On Windows, Flash has tunnels to your video card to let its hugely parallel
processors burst-decode a ton of information at a time. It can’t do that on OS
X, from what I understand — mainly because Apple doesn’t want them to._

I can't believe this. VLC does not use 70% CPU to decode a 720p video, and
it's not using any hardware acceleration other than an overlay. (Or maybe it
renders to a texture; either way, it works fine even with a GMA950.)

It also appears that vidix supports OS X, which lets you actually offload
video decoding to your nVidia card. (Edit: maybe I'm wrong, I was thinking of
VDPAU, not vidix.)

So... I call "LIES" on this. Apple loves arbitrary restrictions, but OS X does
not have many. You can make your GPU do whatever you want, even on Apple
hardware.

~~~
beamso
I found this linked from an old Hacker News article:

[http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1_hardware_acceleration_print.html)

 _In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under
either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that
supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to
the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding
hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases._

~~~
blasdel
Flash 10.1 has been in public beta for less than 6 months, and only
accelerates decoding on minority hardware. A few percent of their install base
has it, tops. Flash on Windows decodes video at unaccelerated libavcodec
speeds just fine without it.

They're pushing this angle because it makes them out to be the heroes -- see
the passive-aggressive spiel you get when you visit the Flash page on an
iPhone -- they'd love to frame everything as "if only Apple would let us".
Unfortunately it's not true in the slightest.

Nobody's shipping a full Flash player for Android or WebOS because it doesn't
exist. Maemo can use a standard desktop NSAPI plugin, but Nokia+Mozilla won't
ship the one Adobe has compiled for them because it's too shitty. All of this
has been "6 months away" for years now, going back to the Macromedia days.

~~~
beamso
I just went to youtube in the default browser on my Maemo phone. The flash
plugin is installed, but Mozilla are ignoring it in the Firefox for Maemo
because of all the crashes.

------
justinph
Flash isn't one of the foundational technologies of the web.

If it has to use the embed or object tags, it is not foundational.

~~~
bilbo0s
This is exactly right.

Flash is a plugin for the web, and unfortunately for its creators, it has not
evolved enough to be of clearly superior use in another capacity. A while ago
Flash replaced Java for embedded interactive media content on the web. Java
did not disappear because Java could be used to do other things. Would GE
Medical Systems write their diagnostic imaging software in Flash? I think we
all know that would not happen. But GE would be fine using Java, and so would
the FDA who audits their software before it can go to market.

My point is, Flash is going to go away. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next
month, but eventually it will go away. And it will go away because its
creators did not innovate and keep evolving it so that it would be useful in a
changed environment. This is the tech industry, the environment always
changes. Even worse for those who want to keep doing what they were good at
yesterday, it changes in unexpected ways.

Let every entrepreneur on this board take what is happening to Flash right now
as a cautionary tale. Let's not rail against it, we should learn from it. This
is how we evolve the American technology industry, by taking these lessons to
heart.

~~~
jacquesm
> This is how we evolve the American technology industry, by taking these
> lessons to heart.

Why only the American one ?

~~~
jrockway
Because the other countries only really exist in movies, obviously.

~~~
mahmud
Boring, indie movies.

------
raganwald
_They could call up Adobe and say “Hey guys, Flash is blowing it in our OS,
why don’t we get a few guys together and work it out?” But they won’t._

Hmmm... It seems to me that Apple has called Adobe up for years to get a few
guys together and help Adobe move their apps up to Apple's latest APIs, to run
native instead of emulated, and all sorts of other stuff, and Adobe has always
dragged its heels.

I'm guessing Apple and Adobe just don't get along and it isn't as simple as
saying that Steve doesn't like them.

------
Zak
If the problem with Flash performance on Mac OS was solely due to Apple being
uncooperative, why does it work just as poorly on Linux?

I really hope this fight seriously diminishes the popularity of both Flash and
the iPhone platform. Apple and Adobe are both working against the interests of
users in trying to insure the continued relevance of their platforms.

------
noelchurchill
I'd be fine if flash disappeared.

~~~
zacharypinter
Perhaps... but the idea of cross-platform web plugins should not go away in
the process. There's still a lot of room for innovation on the web. Let
plugins be the prototype, and let HTML eventually adopt the ones that succeed.

Apple is moving in a direction where you cannot write browser plugins.

~~~
noelchurchill
That's true. Flash has served us well over the years but it's just not needed
any more.

------
cmelbye
Uh... what? The author didn't even provide a reason for why we're not ready to
use HTML5 <video> tags instead of Flash. He says that _"Flash is the
acknowledged standard"_ , whatever that means, however <video> actually _is_ a
web standard.

~~~
jrockway
There are two kinds of standards, de-facto and what a piece of paper says.
<video> is a piece of paper, Flash is de-facto.

(Not that I would ever use Flash on my site, of course, but I can't dictate
policy to the Wider Internet.)

------
jacquesm
Flash wouldn't murder the iPad, it would murder the appstore, and that's why
you won't see it on any apple mobile devices.

The battery life issues are something that could easily be taken care of with
some optimizations.

~~~
tvon
So Flash on OSX has been complete crap for years because...? And you want me
to believe that "oh, on the iPad/iPhone it will be different" because...? Oh,
right, 10.1 will fix all sorts of problems that couldn't be fixed _for years_
because...?

~~~
jacquesm
Mostly because of inaccessible layers of code, not much to do with Adobe, more
to do with apple. If apple would open up some of the lower layers then this
stuff could get a lot faster.

~~~
GeoJawDguJin
And how is it that other third party software mysteriously has access to APIs
that Flash allegedly doesn't? For example, MPlayer is able to offload work to
the GPU.

------
staunch
Assuming Apple provided the necessary API, and Adobe implemented them, is
there any reason Flash couldn't decode a video almost as efficiently as the
iPad's media player?

