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back to article Adobe to Jobs: 'What the Flash do you know?'

Adobe has fired back at Steve Jobs after the Apple boss allegedly attacked Adobe Flash for being "buggy" and referred to the Flashmakers as "lazy." "I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs," Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch wrote today in a back-and-forth with commenters on an Adobe corporate blog, "and if there …

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  1. TJ 1
    Alert

    The reason Flash hogs the CPU

    The guy that heads up the Linux Flash team has been taking it in the neck over the CPU hogging and in a blog post gave a good explanation of why it is so, compared to playing raw videos. Mike Melanson has been a long-time contributor to the ffmpeg project before he joined the Adobe Flash Linux team.

    "The Flash Player solves a different problem than your favorite video player."

    http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/

    He goes on to explain that because of the need to combine video with vector objects, fonts and other elements, Flash cannot simply blit its output to the screen or make use of pure hardware decoding of H.264 and the like.

    A video player does: encoded video data > decoder >YUV > window

    Flash player does: encoded video data > decoder > YUV > YUV-to-RGB > RGB > Blend-Flash-elements > browser window.

    The key aspect here is the blending step.

    For 'just' video streams therefore the player has to be prepared to do blending but it isn't used, but prevents any optimisations for 'movies'.

    A further issue for the Linux player currently is his belief that H.264 video can't be hardware-decoded using VAAPI/VDPAU since those APIs can't decode to a memory buffer. Others have pointed out that belief is incorrect, so it is possible if that information is followed up the Linux player may see some useful speed increases for H.264 decoding.

    It has also been pointed out that the blended elements could be made into GPU textures in the YUV colourspace, which would allow much of the blending operation to be hardware-accelerated on suitable systems.

    So, in terms of performance I think there are two issues people who complain need to understand:

    1. It isn't fair to compare playing an FLV video in a standalone player with it being displayed within a Flash applet since the applet could contain elements that need to be blended into the video image (these aren't like simple on-screen-display overlays).

    2. There are several areas where the Flash applet could be made much more efficient which would reduce CPU usage on many modern systems with hardware support.

    6 1
    1. BobaFett
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      @TJ1: very interesting but...

      Thanks for the insight, it's very informative. But doesn't this just prove that Flash isn't the best solution for video? Perhaps native video support in the browser would be better, like what HTML5 is trying to address but not succeeding very well because of the codec arguments?

      Also, has anyone measured Silverlight video performance between OS X and Windows? Does it exhibit the same issues as Flash?

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  2. Elwood Downey

    flash was indeed buggy for me

    All I can say for sure is the /only/ time I've had a problem with my Macs (1 Air and 1 Pro) it boiled down to a problem with the flash plugin that was killing both Safari and Firefox. Apple said it was a Flash problem, Adobe help never responded. Eventually after rolling back and rebooting the problem disappeared, never did get a real resolution.

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  3. J 3
    Stop

    Crappy designers

    Well, sure Flash sucks, specially on >6 or 7 year old computers like mine. But there are Flash apps and Flash apps. Some run without a hitch and smoothly even on my netbook. Others...

    An important part of the problem is the designers making the damn animations. Some make the thing to be as visually annoying as possible, but that's a different discussion. The problem is the ones that require "programming". Well, of the few graphic designers/ web people I know (3 or 4, not many, I know, but still), all usually say they can't program beyond getting someone's code off the web and trying to make it work on their own page. My girlfriend is one such designer. I hope she does not start messing with Flash...

    Flash got so popular because it made it easy for people with very little (or none) coding knowledge to do complex graphical things on a webpage. Now, is it surprising that the things can be CPU intensive and behave unpredictably? How is that saying about making things foolproof only to reckon with very ingenuous fools again?

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  4. John Boyarsky
    Joke

    So if this is true.. then...

    Well when I read this i had a thought...

    "and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today."

    So by his logic Windows has achieved its widespread monopoly because it has no widespread problems? 500,000 viruses is, therefore, not a problem>

    HA HA HA HA!

    (Joke Alert because the logic is just so funny!)

    4 1
    1. Waffles666
      Reply Icon

      Flash

      "So by his logic Windows has achieved its widespread monopoly because it has no widespread problems? 500,000 viruses is, therefore, not a problem"

      Just because people break into your car doesn't mean your car has problems it just means there is something to gain in doing so, Microsoft do an excellent job at releasing software for thousands of different hardware designs with awesome legacy support. Despite people and their tall poppy syndrome issues.

      Flash has brought an incredible amount to the web. By the sounds of things mac support could use a lot of work but considering that impacts relatively nobody, really who cares?

      0 3
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        @Waffles666

        I see at least two people don't like your humour.

        0 0
  5. Stuart Duel
    FAIL

    Adoobie: Flash crashes Explorer on XP too

    At work, we run XP Pro on a corporate network with over 8000 clients. This system is locked down tighter than Fort Knox, permitting only a tiny subset of Windows applications to be run - because Windows is so brittle - our IT department's excuse anyway. That kind of voids the whole notion of the superiority of the "infinitely larger = better" Windows ecosystem. Whether the IT department's excuse is true or not I don't know. I suspect they probably don't know their arse from their elbow however.

    Anyway, if Internet Explorer is going to crash on our system, you can bet your life a page will have some Flash crap loaded. First the current window becomes unresponsive, then all Explorer windows become unresponsive, then the entire system becomes unresponsive and then the machine does its best impression of a Jumbo Jet throttling up. Good old CTRL+ALT+DEL to kill Explorer fixes everything. Well, kills the problem anyway - and takes out the web apps we use.

    As far as I can tell, Flash doesn't do anything particularly useful and beneficial in my browsing activities on either Windows or Mac and would rather live without it's flakiness.

    A BIG FAT FAIL for Adoobie.

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  6. Martin Nicholls
    Grenade

    If you're Adobe...

    .. surely you call Apple's bluff and kill flash on Mac?

    See how long apple users can go without it?

    I would :)

    The other one is you've just shown your hand to Adobe, Microsoft and Google (you know, those people you keep slagging off) - who all have more seats on the tech comitties of the w3c, so why /wouldn't/ they drag html5 out to 2054 at this point?

    Plus are we really moaning about Adobe when 95% of Mac users are Adobe <product> using graphics people? Come on...

    3 1
    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Because...

      If you kill flash on the Mac, people might just manage without it. (Plenty already do.)

      If you try to kill HTML5 by filibustering the W3C, people might just go ahead and implement it without official blessing, which in legal terms would probably mean without any proprietary codecs. (Firefox certainly will.)

      No, sir, the problem with calling someone's bluff is that they might not be bluffing.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Flame

        Call whose buff? Get real.

        W3C matters not. What Adobe does developers will follow - what MS implement as HTML5 will be HTML5. Firefox matters little either. The thought of Adobe even having to filibuster made me smile.

        Standards folk have always hated Flash because it didn't play fair - it delivers what people wanted not what is good for them, it evolves fast and keeps pace with technology. If the Standards bores had done their job, Flash would have stayed a small proprietaty vector format, instead of filling the RIA gap - and if developers stuck with Standards it would still be the previous century on the Web.

        Its about standards not Standards - W3C long since lost influence on the former.

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    2. Frank Bough
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Mac users running Adobe apps

      ...are the most aggrieved constituency of all - we're the ones that pay Adobe's eye-watering prices and put up with their piss-taking upgrade strategies and almost complete lack of bug fixes. Adobe are living up to every stereotype that characterises the monopolist. Jobs has a massive ego, but he's also an astute judge of his peers. He called this one correctly.

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    3. N2
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      call Apple's bluff and kill flash on Mac?

      Kill flash period!

      So go ahead punk, make my day!

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    4. Keith T
      Reply Icon
      Grenade

      I wish they'd kill Flash on XP too

      Oh wait, they did, they just haven't admitted it yet.

      Or is it, Flash killed XP. Either way, lots of killing going on, lots of crashes on Flash based websites even on fresh Windows XP SP3 fully patched systems.

      2 1
    5. Patrick Mulvany
      Reply Icon
      Grenade

      If Adobe pull the plug

      If Adobe were to pull the plug on Flash support on Mac that would mean they would be pulling the plug on the Mac version for Flash Professional... Therefore all those Flash Coders using Mac's would be forced to :-

      A. Become Windows users

      B. Find an alternate to Flash

      What a dilema... I think the graphic designers revolt would be such that Adobe's bottom line might get hit hard.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Mac is poor relation at Adobe

        Vast majority of Adobe sales (80%+) are for Windows versions. Can't imagine anyone coding full-time in Flash would put up with the crappiness of the OSX version, its full of legacy code and slow as hell compared to the same hardware running the Windows versions which are ground up rewrites with each release.

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  7. tempemeaty
    Grenade

    Flash=BMH

    Flash is a Boated Memory Hog. Everyone know this. That's all there is to it.

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  8. Baudwalk
    Jobs Halo

    "Whenever a Mac crashes..."

    Hold the phone! Macs crash?!?

    Surely not. </sarcasm>

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    1. Neil 6
      Reply Icon
      Megaphone

      tis true...

      ...but when a Mac crashes it's Flash's fault. When Windows crashes because of Flash, it's the underlying Windows code that's at fault. Apparantly. Go figure.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    I agree Adobe should kill Flash on the Mac, too.

    I agree Adobe should kill Flash on the Mac, too. Then I wouldn't have to install a Flash blocker in Firefox (well, I'd still need to install it on my Windows machine).

    Flash has it's uses, but 99.999% of the time it's abused by lazy shit-ass so-called web 'developers' creating web sites that are about as fun to navigate as having lava injected into your rectum.

    Funny how I have no problems with all the sites I visit despite having a Flash blocker. I guess Flash isn't so essential to a pleasant web experience after all.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    flash firefox

    I wish someone would kill flash with a spade and bury it for life on mac's, then less flash sites would mean less flash for everyone and would mean I dont have to install the flash plugins into my otherwise lovely linux boxen so my wife can use her forums etc which depend on the steaming pile of turd and detect flashblock/noscript..

    killall -9 npviewer.bin , please, forever...

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Paris Hilton

      Macs, of course...

      Make up such a massive percentage of the browsing public, so obviously killing Flash on Macs would make such a MASSIVE dent...

      Paris, well she uses flash...

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        It would...

        Seeings a Mac is the platform of choice for the majority of web designers!

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      2. ThomH
        Reply Icon

        The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

        Killing Flash on the Mac would make it unavailable to the designers that produce much of the world's Flash content. The Mac is still the predominant platform for creative uses.

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  11. Zack Mollusc
    WTF?

    t'old days

    I remember the old days. Back then we were all using 14,400 dial-up and had slow cpus and hardly any ram, disk space or colour depth. But we could still download mucky film clips of lasses whose clothes were all in the wash.

    What do we have today? On the one hand the youngsters are downloading those modern DVDs off Norwegian 'Bytestorrent' sites and playing them on their wireless-telephones and digital watches, and on the other hand Adobe reckon it takes massive computing resources to show a cartoon character swearing.

    There's summat wrong somewhere.

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  12. Lionel Baden

    that right apple

    piss off enough people they just gonna hit back and you better make sure you can f'ing swim ...

    just imagine google you tube meeting

    Apple dissed us right ...

    and they cant use flash right ...

    Fuck em lets keep flash video players ...

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  13. Futumsh
    FAIL

    IT Nerds

    Once again I need to remind the majority of posters here that 99% of people browsing the web DO NOT GIVE A FUCK about CPU cycles, buggy code, etc etc etc. All they give a shit about is that they have a browser that allows them to visit YouTube, watch porn, play mindless fucking games like dinner dash and visit the latest crappy reality tv show website and be dazzled by cool animations or whatever.

    They rightfully expect that they can do all of this on any web enabled device and on any browser. If it doesn't allow you to do this, then it aint allowing you to browse the internet (yes Kristian B I said "internet" because that's what the majority of the word calls it you pedantic little prick).

    If the i-Pad doesn't let you do this, they aren't going to say "oh, that must be because of the issue with CPU cycles" they're going to say "what the fuck???" - unless they are small dicked little fanbois quoting from the gospel of Jobs.

    Put simply as of right now, the iPad does not allow you to enjoy all of the web and the almighty saviour of HTML 5 isn't there either. And for that, I (being one of those 99% or webtards) wont be buying one.

    3 3
    1. Frank Bough
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      It's OK

      ..the iPad isn't aimed at the "penniless webtards" demographic to which you and 95% of the rest of humanity belong. So go piss up a flagpole.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Sometimes you have to look in the mirror

      "Put simply as of right now, the iPad does not allow you to enjoy all of the web and the almighty saviour of HTML 5 isn't there either. And for that, I (being one of those 99% or webtards) wont be buying one."

      Put more simply, as of right now the iPad does not allow you to enjoy anything because you can't buy one yet.

      And if you're technical enough to understand that it doesn't have flash and what that means, then you aren't really one of the 99%.

      Personally I think many of the things Adobe does are useful (flash, pdf, etc.), but I think Adobe are completely the wrong company to be doing them, over the years the various runtimes and viewers have become bigger and more unstable without adding any value to me as an end user.

      They really need to decide if they are going to be cross-platform or not and spend some time getting the various products in line and stabilised if they are, right now it's a complete mess.

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  14. Bighands'
    Thumb Down

    Another reason to "hate" Adobe - no CS4 support for case-sensitive file systems.

    Well, I was going to join in and moan about my browsers reliably crashing because of Flash in Safari (Mac) and Firefox (XP), but it seems everyone else has done it for me, which is handy! I would just like to add one thing though. I don't know what planet Adobe have been living on, but CS4 Dreamweaver prevents itself from installing on my Mac with a case-sensitive file system. This is complete madness and the only good reason I can think of is that they are just lazy. So I've found yet another good reason to steer clear of Adobe.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Alternatives...

      Try Coda or Espresso, both are chuffing marvellous little development apps. They don't do WYSIWYG as such, but then that one of the biggest problems with things like Dreamweaver and Expression (which is actually a decent Web IDE) IS that they allow WYSIWYG development. Hand code it baby!!!

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  15. deadlockvictim
    WTF?

    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

    Apple (née Computers) Inc has recently shown that it can live without developers [1]. Apple is too popular and it's no big deal for developers to change. Now Apple (née Computers) Inc has shown that it doesn't need Adobe. In fact, Apple (née Computers) Inc has *never* needed Adobe.

    I wonder who's next: Microsoft [2], possibly Apple's most important partner? Keep watching and find out.

    Remember Apple, you are too big too fail. You have never almost failed before and such a thing in the future is unthinkable.

    [1] Curse Steve Ballmer. I can't write the word anymore without the mental image of Monkeyboy coming to mind.

    [2] Although if Apple did go under, where would Microsoft get its ideas for its new products from?

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    1. TeeCee Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Footnote [2]

      Er, Google? Seems to be where they're getting most of 'em from right now.

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  16. Stu 3
    Happy

    Disable Flash in your browser and see how little you miss it!

    The lack of Flash on the iPad is one of the things that put me off slightly so I tried an experiment: I disabled the flash plugin on my browser. The first thing I noticed was the increase in load time for most webpages - much better without all those crappy ads. The other thing I noticed was how little I missed it. A few red X's where there was embedded video and that was it.

    Flash is rubbish and I won't miss it at all.

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    1. NB
      Reply Icon
      Go

      a thought

      PRO TIP: Install flashblock. Then you get the improved page load times and the option to only enable flash content that you actually want to see.

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      1. Stu 3
        Reply Icon
        Thumb Up

        Thanks

        I'll give it a go.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Question of semantics...

      Sorry to be a pedant, but did you mean *deacrease* in load times, which means an *increase* in performance?

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      1. Stu 3
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        No, you're not a pedant...

        ...that was badly written!

        I meant to say that load times decreased.

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  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No excuse

    If Apple is being inundated with Safari crash reports with a stack trace landing up in the middle of Flash, Adobe can't excuse itself by saying, "we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs". If that statement is true, i.e. they don't know about the bugs, it only points to the fact that they aren't testing rigorously before shipping. While I appreciate that this kind of testing can be expensive, you can't expect to hold onto a huge proportion of the marketplace indefinitely without it.

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  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    what about silverlight mr jobo?

    if Adobe pull flash from mac, Silverlight will take its place...

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  19. Adam T
    Grenade

    Unity3D

    Flash is a dog, and doesn't deserve the foothold it has.

    They need to completely re-write it from the ground up, and if they did they might come up with something as well-optimised as Unity3D.

    Smaller file sizes, better compression, way nicer development IDE, real 3D, here and now, and it even has a FREE version.

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  20. Keith T
    Grenade

    No known bugs because of so little known testing

    "I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs"

    Easy to do when you hardly test your products.

    Adobe needs to learn proper structured testing methods. Don't just test the code under normal vanilla circumstances, but after upgrades and patches, real world type consumer situations.

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  21. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Missing the point here

    If your customer, in this case Apple has a problem with your product (Flash), then you don't try to piss them off by you and your company posting hissy fits on blogs. You talk to your customer to resolve his problems. And never forget that it is your customers that pay your wages!!!

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  22. richard 69
    Stop

    hitler was right...

    the ipad is rubbish...

    and it's dodgy fonts that kill macs not flash....

    1 3
  23. Tom 15

    Meh

    Flash, like any development platform, primarily crashes due to bad development of the individual app. I hadn't seen Flash crash for around 5 years until last night when one site kept crashing all of my Flash instances last night!

    If Flash goes then Silverlight will replace it; the current HTML5 spec is nowhere near the mark on replacing it.

    Final question... what sort of OS can be crashed by a browser plugin? I use Chrome and when Flash did crash last night the worst thing that happened was I got a sad Mac where the Flash was supposed to be.

    1 1
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      meh

      The neglected linux flash plugin is a pile of shit, and crashes with great regularity. While it obviously doesn't take the system down (it's as simple as killing the process and then reloading the page), it's an obviously shoddy job from Adobe.

      Maybe the view from a single platform is different, but I have to use Linux, Mac and even Windows (gah).

      It was also the case that there were political issues with flash on the Mac running too fast at one point- after the piss poor performance caused the developers to ask some Apple insiders how to use the various MacOS acceleration (in Quartz, I think- I always mix those tossily-named APIs up). It's a not very well-kept secret that for a while the Mac plugin was artificially crippled, as the Windows plugin guys couldn't glean the same levels of performance from Windows. Of course, turnabout is fair play, and now the newer 'doze beta plugins have some excellent GPU acceleration features which make it much faster.. plus ca change.

      However, it doesn't alter the fact that quality of the flash plugin is a bit of a lottery across systems, and it's crashy as a Prius being driven by Margaret Beckett, on Linux.

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  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Flash is Buggy (well sort of)

    Ok, so we all know flash is part of our every day lives on the internet.

    I began web designing around 10 years ago and flash was just starting out, it was hardly ever used, it was slow to load, it was slow to use and time consuming, there were issue with SEO (search engine optimisation) and security. My class mates and I would sit around and discuss better ways to code it, but it never replaced html (in my eyes)

    Yes its come along way from then, today lots of these issues are resolved when flash is programmed correctly. However flash has opened up a mismash of thrown together sites that are badly written and badly coded. This does not just display incorrectly (like badly written html), but as flash is a software plugin it crashes that and the browser that is running when it goes wrong.

    So rightly/wrongly Adobe then gets a bit a bit of a bad press on the buggyness of flash when its not their fault lots of the time (however sometimes it is).

    But due to the above points, you can't blame Steve Jobs for not wanting flash on the mobile platforms that Apple are working on. If flash crashes and it takes Mobile Safari with it, there will be lots of people complaining to Apple and Adobe when all along it is the idiot that has coded it that has caused the problem.

    You might see a point when Adobe and Apple work closely together maybe in a partnership with Microsoft and Firefox to create a plugin that handles errors in the flash code better and does not crash the whole browser.

    Fingers crossed because flash used properly is a beautiful thing.

    1 1
  25. ecobore

    buggy Flash

    I would LOVE to see Flash running on the iPhone and the iPad. I find it buggy but not TOO bad on my Mac. And for sure, Adobe is lazy in not producing something that is targeted specifically at OSX and the iPhone/Pad.. Just one of the reasons I have dumped all my adobe stock! C'mon Adobe, you need to prove that you care about us, your minority design, photography and music orientated clientele.

    0 1
  26. ForthIsNotDead
    Coat

    Flash==SaviourOfTheUniverse

    Something you should know about Flash Lyrics

    Title: Queen - Flash lyrics

    Artist: Queen Lyrics

    Visitors: 48463 visitors have hited Flash Lyrics since May 27, 2008.

    Send "Flash" Ringtone to Cell

    Flash a-ah

    Savior of the Universe

    Flash

    He save everyone of us

    Flash

    He's a miracle

    Flash

    King of the impossible

    He's for everyone of us

    Stand for everyone of us

    He save with a mighty hand

    Every man every woman

    Every chill-he's a mighty

    Flash

    Just a man

    With a man's courage

    Nothing but a man

    But he can never fail

    No-one but the pure at heart

    May find the Golden Grail

    Flash: The "Queen" of the Web!! Geddit? Ok, I'll get my coat...

    1 0
  27. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    FAIL

    Calling Oracle DBAs!

    Anyone who has had the pleasure of using the new, revamped Oracle Metalink Support site will know the joy that an entire Flash enabled support site brings. The joy of restarting your browser while researching very important support calls. The deep pleasure that resubmitting support cases over and over 'cos Flash decided it had had enough and wanted to scramble the uploaded text files!

    Oh yes, Oracle support is a real buzz now it's 100% pure flash website!

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