

Dear Flash plugin, love OSX - g0atbutt
http://codesketch.com/2010/01/16/dear-flash-plugin-love-osx/

======
mortenjorck
I've worked in Flash for a decade. My experience with it has gone from
dabbling with it in high school to experimenting with it in college to doing
serious AS development in professional design work. I've come to a certain
level of familiarity with and acceptance of its shortcomings, while trying to
hone my sense of where it is and isn't appropriate to use.

And alas, it feels like that "is" part gets just a tiny bit smaller every day.
For all its quirks and annoyances, Flash is a great environment and it opened
the door to really rich web experiences long before the W3C ever imagined
them. It still has a lot of advantages today, but the W3C is quickly catching
up, and I get a definite sense that Adobe is losing the focus that Macromedia
once had. They're continuing to develop Flash as if today were just a
futuristic version of 2003. But Flash isn't going to stay relevant in a
vacuum.

One of these days, someone (maybe even Apple) is going to come out of nowhere
with a beautiful, visual HTML5 Canvas + JS authoring suite and Adobe is going
to realize just what they've been taking for granted. And by then it may be
too late.

~~~
saikat
Some already exist. Check out Cappuccino (which I use and has been amazing) or
Sproutcore (which Apple now owns, I think). There are others as well.

------
ned
For me the single best web experience improvement in the last year has been to
install ClickToFlash: <http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/>

Suddenly, Safari didn't slow down or crash unexplicably, fantastic.

~~~
ianbishop
I think the only thing that would make my Safari experience more wonderful
would be ClickTo(Animated)Gif.

~~~
brandon
Before there were dozens of decent ad-blocking extensions out there I was a
big user of Privoxy. It had an action called "deanimate-gif" that would
display only the first frame of the animated image.

I'm not sure if Privoxy was downloading the _whole_ image in the background in
order to extract the first frame, and I don't know if deanimation used _less_
CPU or RAM than just displaying the animated versions, but I loved the feature
regardless.

------
g0atbutt
Adobe is ridiculous. Flash on OS X is a joke. It makes sense why Apple is so
hesitant to allow it on the iPhone.

~~~
houseabsolute
Silverlight is even more unstable for me in Safari, and Flash is fine for me
in non-Safari browsers. I don't know if this is everyone's experience, but on
my part I'm more inclined to blame Apple and Safari than Adobe.

On the slowness front, maybe Flash is slower on Mac, but it's hard for me to
fault Adobe on this either (even as a Mac user). If I had finite resources, I
too would allocate more of those to the majority platform.

~~~
jrnkntl
Silverlight is a breeze in Safari for me. It doesn't eat all of my CPU and the
fans keep it down. When I watch a flash movie however on my Mac the fans kick
in and it sounds like it's gonna take off or something. Click2Flash let's me
load the m4v equivalent on youtube but that's unfortunately only for youtube.

~~~
houseabsolute
Interesting. I'm using Click2Flash and I had tried the m4v option, but I get
consistently lower framerates for that than with Flash on Leopard.

~~~
puffythefish
I've noticed that either using Snow Leopard or using the "Play fullscreen in
QuickTime" option cause better framerates. I think it has to do with support
for the <video> tag.

------
Zak
Anybody who thinks that sounds bad should try running Flash on a PowerPC. It
can't play standard size Youtube videos at an acceptable framerate on a G5,
while it provides acceptable performance on an Atom-powered netbook running
Windows.

The situation on Linux is a little better, but performance and reliability are
still poor. Developers should keep this in mind when choosing to use Flash as
a cross-platform environment.

~~~
mortenjorck
My parents have an old G4 iMac. Despite its age, it has no trouble with high-
resolution h.264 videos in Quicktime.

And yet QVGA Youtube clips play at about 3-6fps.

------
jdowdell
Too bad the original post doesn't accept comments.

Yes, Mac performance can be an extra challenge -- think of discussions in 3D,
video-editing, or gaming communities. Things get more complicated when you're
in a browser -- particularly on a Mac, you can see changing performance when
changing browsers. Video will continue to further improve on PCs with hardware
decompression, but on Macs Adobe is still hoping to persuade Apple to open
those APIs to browser plugins. Adobe's own goal is to make things transparent
across hardware/OS brands. And Adobe is interested in adding authoring-support
for "HTML5": <http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/06/adobe_on_html5.html>

~~~
tumult
google's opengl browser plugin, which works fine, speaks otherwise.

it's not an api problem. it's that adobe's software is shit.

------
mcav
Is there a technical hurdle that has given Adobe performance problems on OS X?
Or is it really just the relative market share leading to few development
resources on Mac?

~~~
tolmasky
Look, let's not kid ourselves, the problem is not technical. I'm sorry, but
this stuff isn't rocket science, and even if it was, this plugin has existed
for over 20 years, so they should have figured it out by now. Just think to
yourself how much better the browser has gotten in that time frame, and its
roughly how much worse the plugin has gotten.

The reasons are clearly either politics or incompetence. Now, I'm not sure
_what_ those politics might be. I don't personally believe that its that Adobe
is "angry" at Mac or something, but I for example know that they are
absolutely paranoid about accepting changes to the core code (even obvious
crasher fixes require a ton of approval and consideration).

It really is to their own detriment. Regardless of how big the Mac market may
be (its too big now to ignore and getting bigger), its a very powerful market
of people that matter: i.e. developers. If Adobe got their act together, they
would wipe the floor with JS, HTML5, etc. I mean, they _almost_ do now, its
purely due to their inability that they haven't completely and absolutely
taken over the web.

Of course, the same can be said of standards. Taking 10 years to have any sort
of measurable change on the W3C side is equally unacceptable (and we still
ended up with a video solution that guarantees Flash will dominate this field
for the next 10 years). Its always funny to me when people talk about whether
"standards" or "flash" is winning, because it seems like a race where both
parties are running backwards.

~~~
moe
_this plugin has existed for over 20 years_

14 years.

 _Regardless of how big the Mac market may be (its too big now to ignore and
getting bigger)_

Nu-uh.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_sha...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_share.svg)

 _because it seems like a race where both parties are running backwards._

[http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1925723,00.ht...](http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1925723,00.html)

~~~
tolmasky
_14 years_

Sorry, you are absolutely correct the plugin itself came out in 1996 with the
original software having been developed earlier by PenPoint.

_[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_sha...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_share.svg)
_

Not sure what that is supposed to prove, some would argue that that is a
sizable chunk (bigger than Windows 7 currently). But that's really besides the
point since the argument was that the people that matter are running it.

~~~
moe
When you want to deliver video or games on the web then it's flash, period.
There is no alternative, consequently adobe doesn't need to care about a few
crying developers.

As you pointed out this _may_ partly change at some point in the future with
the HTML video tag, but that happens independently of happy or unhappy
developers.

~~~
tolmasky
Yes, we all know this is the case, this is not novel information and I will in
fact take it a step further and say that its not just games but just about
_any_ media products on the web where Flash is the only answer. For example,
it is completely unrealistic to make a YouTube or Vimeo or even ESPN.com
without Flash today.

My point is that they could have _more_ than just the pure media market if
they got their act together. Its never a good place to be when the only reason
people use your software is because theres _nothing_ else, and not because
they actually like it. Additionally, assuming that there will never be an
alternative is just silly. When your developers are unhappy, they _will
switch_ once its possible. The fact that Google Docs and similar apps are
being done in JS+HTML should be scary to Adobe, if it isn't then they are
frankly not very intelligent. Google _will_ define the web tomorrow, and you
better believe the second they can realistically go Flashless they will.

Again, all these same arguments apply on the standards side as well, they have
dropped the ball and missed the same opportunities again and again, which is
why Flash is still in the running (again, both survive due to eachother's
weaknesses rather than their own strengths).

If Flash absolutely sang on every computer, it would be a much more difficult
argument to make to go the standards route. Not necessarily impossible mind
you, but certainly much harder. If it worked well and exactly the same on
every computer, then its a hard thing to beat.

~~~
moe
Mostly tuning in again to express my amusement over the downvotes from the
(certainly large number of) flash haters. :-)

As for your points, yes, I didn't mean to argue any of that. Just wanted to
set straight that from a business angle Adobe doesn't _need_ to care about
that 6% rounding error at this point.

They're waging a platform war which is different to, say, the browser war.
Their dominance is so overwhelming that developers have no choice but use
them, no matter how much it sucks - adobe knows that very well. That may not
have been the reason for their consequent neglect towards the minority
platforms from day 1. But not spending more resources _today_ on remedying
that situation is most likely a conscious decision (mixed with a bit of
incompetence).

They know that making said developers crazy happy at this point doesn't help
them one bit against the coming open standards. When the HTML video tag
arrives then flash will be pushed out of the video niche, no matter how good
it is or how happy the developers are.

Consequently there's simply not much reason for them to spend resources on
making the OSX or Linux plugin better. Their focus is on the mobile market
now, which is a battle that they really need to win if they want to maintain
any relevance in the future.

~~~
sailormoon
_Adobe doesn't need to care about that 6% rounding error at this point_

I don't have any hard statistics but my anecdotal experience is that the
developers of new, "Web 2.0" applications are more like 60% using macs, not
6%.

------
amadiver
Apple doesn't have a public API for Adobe to hook into to allow for hardware
acceleration. As far as I know, there's nothing Adobe can do to remedy that
situation.

Adobe wants to bring better video performance to the Mac, but Apple is not
supporting them.

Here's the source: <http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641>

~~~
Entlin
I don't buy that. Flash can do everything Parallels can, and - like the
article said - inside Parallels flash is running faster!

~~~
tensafefrogs
So you are suggesting the Flash plugin starts up an instance of windows so it
can utilize the hardware acceleration?

The issue here (with the 10.1 hardware acceleration) is that it requires
updated video drivers, and Apple controls those drivers on OS X, and Apple
hates Flash. Maybe they will eventually add support, but why would they hurry
if they don't like it in the first place?

~~~
jodrellblank
He is suggesting that if there is no public API for Flash to use then there
isn't one for Parallels to use either, yet Parallels manages a better job
running Flash in IE on Windows all virtualised than Flash manages on it's own.

Parallels does not have updated video drivers from Apple, why should flash
need them to match what parallels does now? Whatever Parallels installs or
does to handle dismay updates, Flash plugin could do.

~~~
tensafefrogs
"Parallels does not have updated video drivers from Apple"

Parallels doesn't run in a browser.

~~~
duskwuff
However, a browser runs in Parallels. Which should really be much more
difficult, when you think about it.

------
jsz0
This is exactly what happens when you allow one proprietary plugin to become
dominant. I have no doubt that that it's not in Adobe's best financial
interests to devote more resources to the OSX Flash plugin. It's a small
subset of the market. Most users are just going to suffer with what they have.
Adobe loses nothing by offering a subpar experience on OSX at this point. I
understand it's not realistic to simply say "don't use Flash, ever" because
open standards aren't entirely interchangeable with the wide range of Flash
apps out there. That being said we should certainly be trying to minimize the
amount of Flash used on the Internet. As an avid user of Click2Flash I find
it's quite easy to avoid Flash the majority of the time.

------
jasonlbaptiste
Try Flash on Ubuntu. Things like VDPau are open source and can be leveraged
for GPU acceleration, yet it's still not there. Besides video and games, I
have zero clue what it's useful for. Shitty band websites?

~~~
tensafefrogs
You say that like "video" and "games" aren't a huge industry.

------
larsberg
The 10.1 beta2 for OSX is slightly less horrible
(<http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/>). It's still just as
crashy, but slightly less CPU-killing.

------
nailer
Adobe is really hurting themselves here. If most of the use of Flash on the
web is video, content creators now have raw Theora or H264 in <video> as
stable alternatives, with Flash becoming an IE-only fallback mode.

------
freetard
Dear Flash plugin and Adobe,

Fuck you.

------
hoggle
This might seem a little polemic - and it is - but I have been wishing Flash a
quick death for years now. I simply hate it. No justification of existence for
uncaring companies like that in the web of the year 2010. We don't need Flash!

