

Flash proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance - mkilling
http://www.kitguru.net/apple/zardon/adobe-flash-proven-to-ruin-google-android-2-2-performance/

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anticitizen
You're able to disable Flash on Android by default and only load it on a site
when you approve it. It doesn't 'ruin' anything at all, because you'll never
be using it unless there's Flash content you want to view.

Having content on the web that's unviewable to a device does more to ruin the
experience than a performance hit while doing something CPU-intensive.

Also, from what I've read, this beta of Flash doesn't make use of any hardware
acceleration, while the final release will.

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abronte
Not to mention you have to download the flash player from the market if you
wish to play flash (at least I did when i updated my nexus one), so it doesn't
even come on the device by default as far as I know.

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buster
Oh my god.. not that video again!

Sorry, but this is the most unprofessional comparison i have ever seen.

First, out of three mobiles only one supports flash and that one loads a site
1 sec slower?

Second, Ads are served from different servers and it's quite common that ads
are served slow.. i have browsed the mainpage with a whopping 3 flash ads and
waited like 5 seconds for the flash ads to be displayed after the whole rest
of the page was there.. on my desktop!

Third, 3 devices in a speedtest fighting over one wifi connection on the same
channel for bandwidth? Really?

Please, for the sake of god, if you do comparisons and benchmarks, do them
right! That the whole web is linking this video is awful.

My personal experience with flash: One site gave browser crashes (flashgames).
The rest of the world played nicely so far, with good performance,
surprisingly good, actually. And for a beta release, i hope this one site will
play on release.

Again.. please don't do this.

Worst. Benchmark. EVER.

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buster
edit: pocketnow.com copied locally, served form local network, one device at a
time, stopwatch. It's not that hard... If you ignore the fact that you are
comparing browsers without flash to browsers with flash.. that's stupid. He
should've added lynx to it.

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rayval
Agree. This is a case of, um, Apples versus Oranges.

One can turn off JPEGs in a browser and have the page load faster than a
browser that loads images. But that does not merit writing an article entitled
"JPEGs proven to ruin Android 2.2 performance".

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bphogan
Did any of you catch the comment where the guy from Adobe criticized the guy
in the video for picking random sites?

Seriously?

So, Flash runs _great_ on the Android as long as you only visit the sites that
Adobe hand-picked for the Google IO demo? Maybe I'm reading that wrong... but
that's how it sounds.

Yes, it's beta. But don't hold your breath while you wait for it to improve.
Flash is a big part of the web, and an expensive one too. Computers need to be
fast to run today's Flash content. My netbook (windows) can't run Flash-based
sites, neither can my Mac... so I don;t think we can just blame Apple for not
letting Adobe optimize Flash.

I don't think we need to blame anyone.

The fact is that Adobe makes software that requires serious hardware to run. I
am very skeptical that it will run well on low powered devices. If it does, it
may only do so on "approved" sites which really isn't "choice" as far as I'm
concerned.

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rbranson
Right on all points: Adobe's mistake isn't that they think Flash applications
CAN run on these devices, as clearly this is definitely viable, but that they
think Flash applications (which are designed for desktops) SHOULD run on these
devices. It's a classic case of "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you
SHOULD."

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benologist
By your argument people shouldn't even try to enable huge portions of the
modern internet to run on mobile devices since most sites weren't designed for
phones and it's quite fashionable to see who can load 100s of kilobytes of
JavaScript for mundane purposes.

Flash hasn't outlived its purpose yet, nothing has stepped forward as a
complete replacement, and working to enable the whole internet is a lot better
than settling for some of it.

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Mgreen
The video only proves that loading additional content takes additional time.
Turn off the images, and the loading will be even faster. Turn off javascript
and performance will be even better! News?

Being able to play web games on mobile, is really a cool thing. Turn on the
'on-demand' mode and Flash wont load/play content by default.Compared to how
poorly iphone handles even basic javascript effects, the flash experience on
Android is excellent.

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jrockway
So loading all of the website is slower than loading only random parts?
Really? I would never have guessed _that_...

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jamesbritt
That's amazing. Beta software that's buggy?

Unheard of.

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marketer
It's something more fundamental. When writing software for mobile devices, you
really need to optimize for power consumption. There was a recent talk at
Google IO about the new polling vs pushing for web services, and it's
alarming. If your Android app polls a web service every 5 minutes, it'll use
something like 10% of the battery in one day (just that one app!).

Flash apps are simply not designed for optimal power consumption. Flash is
designed for multimedia apps, which are generally power hogs.

I develop Flash professionally, and I'd never run it on my phone.

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wvenable
Do you run games on your phone? Aren't those multimedia apps as well? But
they're ok and Flash is not? Why is _choice_ a problem here?

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marketer
I'm mostly worried about Flash in the context of network usage. I can't say
how the power performance is for graphics and gaming, but I'd guess it's about
the same as native phone apps.

It's easy to imagine flash apps with network access patterns that aren't
optimized for phones. Take any advertisement or analytics system which
continually polls the server for more data. This will kill your battery if
left running.

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jamesbritt
"Take any advertisement or analytics system which continually polls the server
for more data. This will kill your battery if left running."

How does this compare to some AJAX + a timer? Is it the network call itself
that's an issue, or just how that is implemented in Flash?

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barrkel
Flash is useful for video everywhere but Youtube. And it works. But for ads
etc., it's best turned off.

Android is better and more useful for having Flash than not. But plugin
support in the browser should be made on-demand, or turned on and off as
desired.

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Tichy
It is. You can select to run plugins only on demand, which naturally is the
only sensible way to run flash. This whole "claim" is completely silly.

Even on the desktop (ie OS X) the web becomes unusable with Flash enabled all
the time. There are plugins like NoFlash that make it acceptable, and the
occasional interesting Flash app makes it worthwhile.

~~~
barrkel
I misspoke - I know, I have flash on my Nexus One running Froyo.

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yason
Wasn't this expected? Scrolling pages even on my desktop browser got much
snappier after enabling FlashBlock or equivalent.

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chrischen2
They could make it so that it doesn't automatically load all flash on page,
and only ones you activate.

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Tichy
It already works that way. Therefore the whole claim of ruined performance is
complete bullshit.

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thought_alarm
Watched it on my iPad.

What's not mentioned is how extremely well the iPhone and iPad handle embedded
HTML5 video; smooth scrolling and zooming, plus hardware decoding. If Google
had also decided to only support HTML5 video that would only accelerate what
is already rather quick adoption of that standard, and everybody would win.
Instead they're relying on Adobe to deliver Android's video, and the results
are predicably bad. But it's a bullet point they can add to their new anti-
Apple marketing strategy, and I guess that's more important than the actual
quality of the software they ship.

