

Flash haters, wake up (HTML5 ads demo) - joshuacc
http://simurai.com/post/1520282329/html5-ads

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sipefree
The difference is that Flash is produced solely by Adobe. Their rendering
technology is closed source and produced by a single team of developers. No
one can contribute to their performance except them. There are many browser
developers working on their technologies, and Webkit is one of the largest
currently. It's an open source project that any good developer can contribute
to. Mozilla is the same. This means that if one browser is doing really power
intensive animations, you can either switch to another or contribute to the
performance of your browser by writing better animation code and submitting a
patch.

We're a long way off from web ads being as animation intensive as the latest
3D games. Browser rendering technology can reach the point where the
animations that we're used to seeing these days can be optimized quite well,
especially if the graphics card is involved. Real strides in the power of
HTML5 animation has only reached an awesome level in the past year or so. Next
year things will be even better, and it will take advertisers a lot longer to
move on from Flash.

As for ad blockers, they have been blocking non-flash content for years now.
Google ads are HTML and javascript based, and they are blocked just fine. Same
with popups: all javascript. Most advertisers are not going to spend a hell of
a lot of time trying to get around ad blockers, since they work with mass
distribution and an awful lot of punters don't care about downloading and
using an ad blocker. The only sites that try really hard to make you see or
click on an ad are usually scams anyway.

~~~
chipsy
We're going to get 3D ads. This is not a maybe; the ability is there, so it
will happen. Anything else is wishful thinking.

And they won't be rotating cube demos - no, the designers will instance an
entire 3D engine, and they'll start dumping in expensive shaders and high-poly
models that "work for them" on a high-end desktop. And then web sites load
three or four of these ads. No optimization or acceleration is going to tame
such monstrosities. Your netbook might hang just trying to load the page,
forcing you to use an ad blocker whether or not you want one.

The long-term solution is for ad networks to minimize client-side tricks and
stick to safer performance envelopes(images or video).

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sosuke
Thanks for that example, it's been mentioned several times that the Flash
technology isn't the only cause of the CPU being pegged but the code that
banner developers are writing as well and now I've got a good sample to share.

98% CPU usage when the tab is active. I've got an iMac, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2
Duo with 4GM RAM

When the tab is active the CPU usage for Firefox is at 98%, when it isn't the
active tab it goes down to 12%, that is interesting. I wonder if Flash stops
on inactive tabs currently. I know you can program for that functionality but
is it in there by default now?

~~~
cjbos
This is how flash player now works, with the latest release it drops the frame
rate of the flash movie to something like 2-3 frames per second if the movie
is not visible in the browser.

Flash player is also single threaded so executes code on a single cpu core,
but it does rendering using multiple cores. If you are seeing a single core
spike to 100% usage then it is a sign of badly coded actionscript
(onFrameEnter event handlers are very popular with designers who cut and paste
as2 code), if you are seeing multiple cores at around 100% then it is a
rendering issue, i.e. trying to redraw the entire stage every frame and/or a
very high frame rate (> 30 fps).

I'm not sure if code attached to the frame in the Flash IDE would also cause
multiple cores to spike, or if this also executes in the single threaded
cycle. But again, having actionscript inside the .fla instead of separate .as
files is a sign of a poorly designed/developed flash application.

------
DjDarkman
Still HTML5 could give browser makers the chance to optimize, even for
platforms Adobe could care less about.

------
drivebyacct2
Basically, I don't care. Flash is awful in Linux. I can't even use it in
Chrome really, I have it disabled and only use it in Firefox. It's shocking
how little I actually miss. I don't see how the blocking game is going to be
that much different than what it is now with AdBlock... it blocks all sorts of
ads right now, it's hardly limited to flash ads.

Not to mention the author can't read.

"As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be
had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X"

is the exact opposite of

"Currently it sucks, but I also don’t care about the future"

It says that there are gains by DISABLING flash... and yes, I'll keep my
fingers in my ears if it keeps pushing HTML5 and related technologies forward.
I hate flash. It is a daily annoyance.

~~~
grantheaslip
Agreed. I use 64-bit Chrome in Ubuntu 10.10 and it's unusable. I'm not sure if
it's better in 32-bit, but there's frankly no way I'm going to compromise on
my browser choice purely because of Adobe's incompetence. It usually freezes
or drops down to maybe 5 FPS when I make a video full screen, it constantly
uses a ridiculous amount of CPU time, it crashes tabs, and the font rendering
is as shitty as ever.

I love when videos are on Vimeo because all of their videos play natively, and
when I click on a YouTube video, I'm always hoping that it isn't one of the
Flash-only videos that I need to switch to Firefox to watch. HTML5 might be in
its infancy, but it already sucks a lot less than Flash, at least for those of
us that aren't using Windows.

The issue isn't just performance—it's who I want controlling web technologies.
HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are open standards that anyone can implement.
Whether or not the performance is the same right now, I have way more faith in
Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera than I have in Adobe (and if they all drop
the ball, someone else will pick it up). Adobe definitely has talented
engineers, but they've demonstrated again and again that they're just not
capable of making Flash stable and efficient. I'm not sure if this is the
legacy cruft built up in Flash, a lack of interest in performance on platforms
besides Windows, or just pure incompetence, but I don't care. They've had over
5 years (over 10 if you count Macromedia) to work their shit out, and they
haven't.

Flash may have had a role back when web technologies just weren't up the task
for displaying any kind of rich content, but that day has passed. It's telling
that the vast majority of articles I've read defending Flash are written by
people who directly profit from Flash continuing to be a relevant technology.
Some are Flash evangelists, others are just people who decided to hitch their
careers to Flash and are just now coming to terms with what a bad decision
that was, and a few just plain don't understand what they're talking about
(e.g. Dave Winer). This author isn't one of them—he's actually provided a
reasoned argument, and the awesome CSS3 stuff he's been putting out shows that
he's not just blindly defending the only tool he knows—but people like him
seem to be few and far between.

~~~
pan69
I don't want this to be a "works for me" response, but I'm currently running
Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) on 64-bit and for me the Flash Player performs excellent. I
can watch hours of YouTube videos, switching to full-screen and back, without
a hitch. My primary browser is Chrome (installed from the Ubuntu repos, not
Google's nightly builds) but Flash Player also runs just fine in FireFox. It
might be worth checking for the latest version of Flash Player.

~~~
grantheaslip
I'm using the latest 10.2 beta release. It's actually a marginal improvement
over the official 10.1 package in the Ubuntu repositories. I'm using a Lenovo
X201 with a common Intel graphics chip (I think it's referred to as "Intel HD
Graphics"). The chip isn't the speediest out there (games are out of the
question), but it's more than fast enough for HD video.

I don't need any unsupported closed-source drivers, and my system is basically
all Intel hardware, which as far as I'm aware are the most Linux-friendly
components out there. I'm using a more-or-less stock Ubuntu install. One thing
worth pointing out is that performance seems to be worse in 10.10 compared to
10.04, but I'm hesitant to blame Canonical, as Flash seems to be basically the
only thing suffering.

The thing is, I'm probably in the top 1% of computer users in terms of
competence. If I can't figure out how to make Flash work on my laptop, how the
hell is my Mom going to? If it won't _just work_ on one of the most ideal
Linux environments, something is fundamentally wrong.

