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. wangi
    FAIL

    "no crash bugs

    Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch might like to try Flash on 64 bit Linux...

    That's assuming crashing down to a white box isn't the intended behaviour.

    1. mwk

      To be fair

      I don't think they've ever actually called that anything other than an alpha.

      1. Adam T
        Alert

        Alpha? Unsupported?

        So they ARE lazy!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Huh

      It is an unsupported alpha version...

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: Huh

        Maybe that's where he gets his 98% figure from. Anything that doesn't support flash just isn't a PC.

        Given that Windows doesn't ship with flash pre-installed, and doesn't tick the "automatically download and install any old shit" box in the default settings, the figure of 98% is surely an exaggeration. It requires a conscious decision by an administrator to get flash on a PC and there must be plenty of corporate systems where the administrator just doesn't see GooTube as an essential app. Maybe anyone who chooses not to run flash isn't a proper PC user. Yeah, that must be it.

        That would leave 2% of proper users with proper PCs, who presumably just can't get the Adobe updater to work through their NAT. That sounds about right.

  2. David Kelly 2

    FLASH not missed

    Two blank FLASH boxes on the previous Register page, and 3 on the page these message is being typed thanks to Click2Flash plug-in. I'm not missing anything but CPU cycle stealing eye candy worthless advertisements. Never mind I'm using a 2.8GHz 4GB quad core Mac Pro with 22" wide LCD.

    Advertisers: if you want more views provide your content in something other than FLASH.

    1. Waffles666

      lol

      "two blank FLASH boxes on the previous Register page, and 3 on the page these message is being typed thanks to Click2Flash plug-in. I'm not missing anything but CPU cycle stealing eye candy worthless advertisements. Never mind I'm using a 2.8GHz 4GB quad core Mac Pro with 22" wide LCD"

      Without flash we would not have nearly as many sites using embeded video which i consider to be some of the best part of the web. I have never had any crashes relating to flash in any of the browsers or if there was then i didn't notice. If you are having issues running a little program like flash on your setup then i think its time to switch to windows because that really poor i know support for anything not apple is rubbish but seriously saving cpu cycles by not running flash is laughable. Finaly 22" LCD has nothing to do with the speed of flash on your computer, you weak video card might do though...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Jobs, he speaks the truth

        Flash regularly ate up 80%+ of a 2.66 GHz C2D CPU rendering crappy little web games on my 10.6 Mac (assuming it hadn't already crashed the browser).

        This was before I discovered ClickToFlash anyway. I now live in a Flash-free paradise. You should try it. Time for Flash to just go away and be forgotten.

      2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        laughable

        "saving cpu cycles by not running flash is laughable"

        Now *that's* funny. You've never measured it then? You sit there staring at an otherwise static web page with the CPU usage churning at 20% or so. What the fsck do you think it is doing?

        "If you are having issues running a little program like flash on your setup then i think its time to switch to windows "

        So a "little program like flash" is important enough to dictate my choice of OS? Despite the fact that it serves no purpose other than to display annoying ads and burn CPU cycles? Oh, I forgot, you consider flash to be synonymous with embedded video and the latter to be the best of what the web has to offer.

        I pity you.

      3. Jesthar
        FAIL

        Re: waffles

        "Without flash we would not have nearly as many sites using embeded video which i consider to be some of the best part of the web. I have never had any crashes relating to flash in any of the browsers or if there was then i didn't notice. If you are having issues running a little program like flash on your setup then i think its time to switch to windows because that really poor i know support for anything not apple is rubbish but seriously saving cpu cycles by not running flash is laughable. Finaly 22" LCD has nothing to do with the speed of flash on your computer, you weak video card might do though..."

        Speaking as someone who has just completed a weeks worth of UAT testing of an very advanced web-based document management system on a low powered mini-desktop running XP and IE7, I can safely say that saving CPU cycles by disabling Flash is NOT laughable. Even in Windows.

        My data and refresh heavy tests were completed without the machine ever breaking into a sweat. Auto refreshing webmail and remote access to my company network were no problem. Browsing of graphic heavy websites and the occasional YouTube video caused only mild CPU fan activity.

        Go to a website with flash adverts, though, and you immediately heard the whine of the fans speeding up to maximum. Minimise that window, and the spin down was equally as quick. Or, if on refesh you got a static advert or one that didn't load for some reason, again the fans spun down.

        Conclusion: badly optimised and/or over fancy Flash eats CPU resources at an alarming rate. True, a graphics card mitigates this loading, but why the heck should you need a beefy graphics card to play something that's supposed to be basic web content? Especially when there are now other options out there...

        1. Waffles666

          Not the point

          >>>"Speaking as someone who has just completed a weeks worth of UAT testing of an very advanced web-based document management system on a low powered mini-desktop running XP and IE7, I can safely say that saving CPU cycles by disabling Flash is NOT laughable. Even in Windows."

          I was replying to another comment about saving CPU cycles on an Intel 2.8GHz quad core with 4GB RAM. In relation to the very underpowered machines you were using that would make more sense.

    2. Mike G
      Jobs Horns

      Freetards will rue the day when ads aren't flash..

      If adverts were animated SVG in canvas they'd likely be even more CPU unfriendly.

      What would free/mactards like yourself have to whine about then when your beloved web standards gets hijacked by ad agencies and are now a lot harder to block because they're a core part of the html and not a plugin?

  3. Alan W. Rateliff, II
    Paris Hilton

    And Windows x64 Flash?

    Any word of that, yet?

    Hello?

    Paris, word.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Silverlight is 32-bit only

      That's not to excuse Adobe, but it's interesting that Microsoft made the same decision.

  4. James 47
    Thumb Up

    I've heard it before

    I know of a company that works with Abode and by all accounts Flash is quite buggy. It's not very tolerant of things going wrong.

    1. Mike G

      Ho hum 'a man in a pub told me'

      I work with Flash (not just 'might of heard' or other made up BS). The IDE itself may be unreliable, but in 5 years of using it never had any -player- bug that was a showstopper, or ever caused a full browser crash that was a real, repeatable situation. There's a lot of badly written actionscript out there however, as anybody with the debug player installed can see (it shows runtime code errors)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Why Flash Sucks

    http://www.youtube.com/user/WhyFlashSucks

    One page open in Safari (Adobe's own) and that is it. One page. One instance of Flash. 80-99% of both CPUs in constant use.

  6. asdf
    Flame

    its far worse than this

    Yes the flash is dog but I could live with that if wasn't so poorly coded as to also be one of the biggest security risks on the internet. Adobe makes some of the poorest quality code out there and unlike even M$ has not learned (or doesnt care) the danger it is exposing its customers to.

    1. Al Jones

      Most of Adobe's users aren't "customers"

      The 98% of desktops that he referred to belong to people who have never paid Adobe a cent, and Adobe apparently doesn't care about them. Unless Adobe's actual customers stop creating Flash content, Adobe doesn't have much incentive to spend money to fix the problem, unfortunately.

  7. ThomH

    I'm with Jobs on this one

    The Flash plugin is the only thing that crashes on my Mac. As a quick test, when using it to view a particular MP4 video, the Flash player used 120% CPU (ie, all of one core, 20% of another). When I downloaded that video and played it — exactly the same file — using Quicktime, I got 40% CPU usage.

    I appreciate Lynch has to protect the public image for the purposes of shareholders, but is it really wise to say things that end users can immediately tell are false?

    1. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Satan must be freezing his butt off...

      But I find myself agreeing with Darth Jobs as well.

      My own company uses that crap for it's tech support GUI now, and I refuse to use it, and so do a *lot* of customers.

      When I hit one of those "click here to skip flash intro" sites, I just plain go elsewhere.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Not buggy AND

      "After admitting that Mac video performance on one (relatively gutless Mac mini) test system showed it to be over twice as CPU-taxing as on the same system running Windows in Apple' Boot Camp environment"

      Am I missing something here? Any code that uses twice the CPU to do the same thing is buggy as hell. Optimization is NOT that hard.

  8. Stuart Halliday
    Thumb Up

    Odd defensive comment

    A bug doesn't have to crash an app to be 'buggy'. Surely a rendering flaw is equally intrusive and let's Adobe down.

    Why don't they release a version that's been QA tested a little bit harder?

  9. Hugh McIntyre

    Child processes

    Leaving aside the bugs, CPU load, and memory leakage bugs in the past (eventually leading to a crash when the browser gets to 2GB-4GB), and which have certainly existed on Unix and MacOS at least, what would be useful is the browser vendors to put flash in a captive child process so that if the Flash process dies, it only kills Flash (with a possible "Would you like to restart" option) rather than killing the whole browser.

    It's possible that some users might kill the flash process themselves some of the time ...

    Meanwhile, part of the problem here is that IIRC, Flash is at least as much a programming language as a pure Video format, and therefore if random web developers write bad Flash programs that loop like crazy, your CPU will be pegged just as much as if they did so in Java, JavaScript, etc. Some of the actually useful Flash applications (e.g. zoomify.com) are based on this, which makes it non-obvious that a pure video format is a replacement.

    The other thing the browser people could do to help would be to stop the Flash animations in minimized windows and tabs so there is less CPU load.

    Meanwhile, there's FlashBlock :)

    1. David Webb
      Jobs Horns

      Chrome

      If Flash crashes on Chrome, Chrome kills the plugin with a message saying "this plugin crashed, whoops!", although if Flash did take down Chrome it would only kill the one tab rather than the entire browser.

      Anyhow, is Jobsworth right to bar flash from the iPad? Up to him, but he should realise that he will not be able to advertise it in the UK as a "full" internet device without it, the iPhone already got slapped down by the ASA because it doesn't play Flash and if he is trying to market it as a device for viewing the internet, he really should allow it to, you know, play the majority of the internet.

      It's all bull though, Jobsworth wants HTML5 and he wants the HTML5 with his own codecs, not ogg or whatever, but that other one I can't think of right now. By only allowing the iPad to use HTML5 (and it'll obviously only support Jobsworth's preferred codecs) he throws a spanner in the works. What'll be so nice now is if Microsoft and Mozilla team up and say "ok, IE8 and Firefox will only use OGG in HTML5, we will not support any other standard", that'll piss off Jobsworth!

      1. Kristian B
        Alert

        @David Webb

        @David Webb

        What are you talking about "full internet device", "device for viewing the internet", and "play the majority of the internet" ?!?

        The Internet is an infrastructure of interconnected networks. I think you mean the Web (World Wide Web), which is just one network service.. not the "full internet".

        People will disregard your comment as someone who doesn't know the difference between the internet and the web is obviously clueless.

        1. GZA a.k.a. The Genius

          @Kristian B

          You know what @David Webb meant! People will disregard your comment as someone who is a nob.

        2. TeeCee Gold badge
          Jobs Horns

          Yes, but.

          Apple's ads for the iPhone do (or rather did) state "the internet", "the full internet", "not just the mobile internet", etc and made no reference to the WWW. Those claims are what the ASA nailed them to the cross for.

          Clueless yes. But it's the Lord High Cultist and his ignorant sheep you should be dissing not Mr Webb, he's just accurately relaying the iCobblers....

      2. Player_16

        @David Webb

        I'll try to clue you in. HTML5 is an open standard so it runs in QuickTime. H.264 also runs in QT and the iPhone. If you want to see video on the iPhone: H.264. Flash is standard based on a proprietary technology: it's old; like 1999 old; like 32-bit binary old. The web has moved on. So, in Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, OS X does not. Linux has problems with it too. And to quote from Firefox for Maemo RC3 site:

        "We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards."

        So Adobe needs access to Apple's hardware to make Flash run better...

        That ain't gonna happen. So you just go on hatin' and dissin' Apple and continue living in the past.

    2. YARR
      Megaphone

      Throttle 'em

      Yes bad flash coders can easily max out your CPU, but there's no reason why the interpreter can't monitor this and throttle back the interpreting speed when this occurs.

      It's poor flash ads that drove me to install flashblock, so Adobe ought to realise they are losing market share because of this.

    3. Mikey 1

      Child processes

      I've seen Safari play nicely like that on occaision - a nice blank space on the page and a wee message along the lines of "Flash was hurting me, so I kicked him out." - just in the latest or so version I think.

      I've also seen it crash Safari so there you go.

      As it is, in SnowLeopard, Flash runs as a seperate 32bit process alongside the 64bit Safari, because as with Windows 64bit - it's all a bit much for Adobe.

      Meanwhile, there's ClickToFlash. :-)

  10. Lawrence 7
    Heart

    Massive Pressure

    My Macbook cooks faster than I do whilst watching porn, err I mean flash video, yet I can watch full on Movies in many other formats with the fan gently tickling my processors neck.

    This is my main problem with flash: as the Youtube video abive points out nicely.

    I dont have a massive hatred for it: Flash has done wonderful things for the richness of the net, but the seriously need to sort out how much it batters my processor.

    so yea, its annoying, but Im all for it not being on my phone if it means my battery lasts longer.

  11. R Cox

    Put in an off switch.

    Flash is only "achieved its wide use today' because it does not have an off button, combined with the system of secretive cookies. In essence Flash provides the lack of transparency that so many third parties crave in a way that HTML does not. If Safari had a Flash Blocker installed by default, then I would absolutely love to have Flash on the iPhone. My preferred browser, Camino, has such functionality. I don't see why every browser should not. Installing such basic functions after market is as silly as having to install a plugin to stop animated gifs.

    And to echo what others are saying, yes, when my browser crashes or gets into a place where I have to force a quit, Flash is pretty much always to blame.

  12. Bear Features
    Jobs Horns

    uhuh

    Naturally, if Apple doesn't use it, there must be something wrong with it. :o) Then the moment they ship it, "iWOW... " it's like the first time they've seen it.

    Bluray.... HDMI et al.

  13. Cliff

    Drunk at the bar

    Jobs sounds more unhinged as time passes - these very public jibes at competitors are not very gentlemanly, and leave him looking like the bitter old drunk at the bar whining about the world.

    Now my love for Google and Adobe is certainly limited, but this very public fight-picking does seem somewhat loopy, and who wants to buy stuff off the nutty old drunk in the corner? It's very unattractive.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Lazy is right

    As Alan W. Rateliff, II pointed out, where is 64 bit Flash on Windows ? Hence I'm running a 32 bit browser on Vista 64 bit. They've only had 2 years...

    ALSO - Adobe Premier Elements and Adobe Photoshop Elements are not supported on 64 bit Windows. Dreamweaver 8 (as supplied free from 1&1) is not supported on Windows 64 bit.

    Adobe are LAZY and SLOW (or, they could be thick). I hope HTML5 kills off Flash - good riddance to Adobe.

    Having said all that, Apple were lazy (or too fast to market with the product) with the original iPhone - claiming things like 3G was not viable (due to battery life) and MMS was not required (not that I've used it).

  15. Adrian Esdaile
    FAIL

    It's the UNKNOWN bugs we ship....

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

    Well, der.

    It's the bugs you don't know about that cause all the problems then, isn't it?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Actually...

      You missed the bigger issue with that statement. It's also an implicit admission that they ship Flash with known security issues, known rendering issues, known performance issues and various other known issues. They just make sure to get the crash bugs out before they ship. Adobe needs to realize that crashing is only one small reason why people hate Flash and fix the others.

      Note: performance issues can easily become crashing issues to the end user who has to kill their browser/tab to remove the offending Flash graphic.

      And no, I don't miss seeing Flash in my 64-bit browser at all.

  16. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    FAIL

    Hanging is OK

    Flash Player 10 release notes:

    "Receiving live streaming audio for over an hour may result in loss of audio and a non-responsive Flash Player. (237333)"

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    sure flash is buggy

    I am currently grappling with one of Flash's worst defects- it's inability to deal with bitmaps over 2880x2880...it's the type of nightmare issue that makes it impossible for a Flash developer to avoid. It's undocumented and flash throws an unhandled error.

    - but despite it's foibles Flash is a must have for me. There is so much great flash content out there - that the web simply isn't the same without it - sure there are loads of pointless flash animations, intro screens etc. But there are also some amazing applications out there created with Flash/Actionscript . I use the Flex Eclipse based IDE for my actionscript development and absolutely love it. I've been programming .NET since the 1.0 Betas and Java, VB and VC++ for years before that and I love programming in Flex as much as anything else I've worked with. The ability to point Flex at your web services and have it create you an actionscript class library is a pure time saver, and when you start to interact with client side Javascript you realise that Flex is a very powerful tool indeed which lets you use an underlying transport mechanism that is way better than your average bug ridden AJAX / HTML 4 based site. Sure Flash can be a challenge - and it in it's Flash CS4 encarnation it is a complex environment to understand well enough to create solid applications - but it can be done so long as a structured approach to the project is used and that approach is based on a correct understanding of Flash's object and event model and asyncronous programming. Flash's worst trait is it's acceptance of sloppy 'hippy' code of the type you'd find at your local Perl convention - you can get away with murder - Actionscript 3.0 is a step forwards - but you can't admire Actionscript script in the same way as you can in say Java. Java really brings out the best in a programmer - but Flash brings out the very worst. In almost all programmers of curly bracket languages, when they encounter actionscript it has them doning their stetson and joining the ranks of the cowboy builder and they don't even know it. That is because Actionscript really does need a knowledge of Flash to really appreciate it, and that knowledge can only really be achieved by playing with the visual stuff first hand. That is why good actionscript programmers are few and far between compared to say C# programmers or PHP programmers - both of which are far more common. If only Microsoft woulf just license Flash and work with Adobe to integrate it into .NET - they would rule the world if they did that and bring to different development worlds, which if brought together would make the world a better place.

    Respect to Steve Jobs on many counts- but he's totally barking up the wrong tree on this one, HTML 5 is a further step backwards in computing and Adobe and Microsoft are right on the money with the Flash and Silverlight as the visual end of a proper web development environment. And you haven't even got me started in the media server arena - Adobe you rock although your media server is over priced and Flash CS4 is buggy as hell. But you make the web rock (or at least those of you who used to work for Macromedia). You created postscript. That's an invention better than anything Steve has created - he's just a business shark. In tech terms he's a phony. Woz was the man - but postscript is a historic invention - but Steve is talking and manipulating a generation too young to remember the impact of Postscript. Whereas I was there in '87 with my Mac SE when Adobe released Illustrator 1.0 - we saved files in ps format, transferred them to the PC with an external 5 1/4 in drive the site of a breeze block and then incorporated those files as the graphic elements of our printer output from our DOS based, Turbo C based applications. at the time it was a kind of magic - those laser printed curves looked unreal compared to the output you'd get from most DOS based programs. Respect to Adobe for that- you are one of the true catalysts of the information age. Apple - the fact you nicked the mouse driven GUI For the Apple LISA from Xerox and you can still to this day trace your gui directly to that GUI means that in the over kudos of things technological Adobe out trumps you and always will. The sad thing is the organizations such as the BBC make so much of the populist iPhone because all it's staff are addicted to iPhones and Twitter - that at least for the population of this country, the general public will probably never know how Adobe help shaped the world they live in - they will just listen to Steve and spend 500 pounds on a machine that allow them to do less than any other computer they have ever owned.

    We want HTML 5.0 - but we want that for richer interlinked documents than we have at present. But we want Flash and Silverlight to perfect the art of streaming audio and video with the embelishment of animations. A few versions of Flash + Papervision 3D + processing power and the web will be come the 3D virtual paradise that we read about in the days of Mosaic....

    1. Mike G

      mmm large bitmaps in swf not a good idea

      You realise to handle 2880x2880 image takes over 32mb memory, and manipulating it a lot of cpu? You realise that FP9 has a built in limit of 2880x2880 to protect against people overusing resources?

      http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/bitmap_caching_05.html

      Hey Mac users, here's the man that's been crashing your safari !

    2. Adam T
      FAIL

      2880x2880 WTF

      And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I absolutely fucking hate Flash.

      As an authoring platform, it's done wonders to add diversity to the web.

      As an authoring paltform, it's done wonders to put dangerous tools in the hands of idiots.

      Little wonder Flash crashes if it's allowed to suck the life out of your system's resources. People who use Flash, but don't know shit about what they're doing should be banned from using it.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @kneejerkers above

      It's quite possible in Flash to store a large bitmap in a compressed format (eg png). You can then create useful/viewport-sized bitmap data chunks from it at runtime and render just that part out. So as long as the programmer makes sure that each chunk of bitmap data is properly garbage-collected the whole "takes 32mb of memory" argument is false.

      In fact some of you sound just like the people referred to in the original post, bringing your expert knowledge of computers to Flash without bothering to find out if that knowledge actually applies in context.

      Agreed with AC above, a well-structured Flash application can be very stable, but Flash is too forgiving in letting people use it without understanding it properly.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Maybe the world has changed?

    Where once mains powered PCs ruled the roost with CPU, energy and video card there to help that world is passing with replacement in the form of low energy units with limited resources and often limits upon multitasking?

    If so maybe Flash has to catch up.

  19. KenBW2

    Adobe, Apple

    I can't bring myself to agree with either of those :(

  20. BobaFett

    Mac Performance

    Ars Technica examined Flash 9 and 10 performance back in October 2008 and whilst Flash 10 is noticeably better than Flash 9, it's still 6 to 10 times more CPU efficient on Vista than OS X.

    http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-flash-player-10.ars

    Flash 10.1 appears to have improved Hulu performance on OS X by around 230% without any GPU acceleration, which would make it only about 3.3 times worse than on Windows now instead of 8 times. Unfortunately 10.1 isn't available yet.

    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678&p=6

    Evidently Adobe have been making efforts to improve Mac performance and have a number of technical excuses for why performance isn't the same as on Windows. Whether there's any merit to these is hard to say. Ultimately though, Adobe, for whatever reasons, have neglected Flash on Mac OS X for too long and while 10.0 is the current version, Mac users are well advised to install a Flash blocker like Click2Flash.

    1. Oninoshiko
      Headmaster

      yes, but

      yes, but they manage to stop serving to Linux and OpenSolaris on x86-64 with flash 10, not to mention breaking Opera intigration in OpenSolaris...

      So on Linux and OSOL it's not infiniately less effecent!

  21. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
      FAIL

      Re: Muhahahaha

      "If flash is badly supported over the Mac -dunno, even less who to blame- it is the duty of Apple to facilitate a fix"

      And just how are Apple supposed to "facilitate" a fix of software that isn't theirs? Let's see now, they could reverse engineer the code and get sued for squillions, or they could chuck a flipping enormous bung at Adobe and say "pleeeeeez".

      Are you *really* suggesting that the correct response to a load of shit is to reward the authors in the hope that they'll deliver rather less in future?

  22. Renato
    Flame

    Flash & CPU

    For those whining "Oh my! Why do you want to save CPU cycles if you have a powerful almighty dual core processor?": Hell, I do have wi-fi (and 3G) and a notebook! I want to surf the Intarwebbs for 3 hours without plugging any wires. But without Adblock+, Noscript, Flashblock and the eventual Greasemonkey script it's fscking impossible due to Flash's bad performance (and dodgy javascript too). And AFAIK CPU usage is related to both lap heating and short battery duration.

    Flames, 'cos that's how my laps feel after watching a youtube video.

  23. 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.

    1. BobaFett
      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?

  24. 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.

  25. 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?

  26. 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!)

    1. Waffles666

      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?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Waffles666

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

  27. 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.

  28. 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...

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        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.

    2. Frank Bough
      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.

    3. N2
      Thumb Up

      call Apple's bluff and kill flash on Mac?

      Kill flash period!

      So go ahead punk, make my day!

    4. Keith T
      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.

    5. Patrick Mulvany
      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        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.

  29. tempemeaty
    Grenade

    Flash=BMH

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

  30. Baudwalk
    Jobs Halo

    "Whenever a Mac crashes..."

    Hold the phone! Macs crash?!?

    Surely not. </sarcasm>

    1. Neil 6
      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.

  31. 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.

  32. 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...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      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...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It would...

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

      2. ThomH

        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.

  33. 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.

  34. 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 ...

  35. 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.

    1. Frank Bough
      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.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      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.

  36. 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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      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!!!

  37. 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?

    1. TeeCee Gold badge

      Re: Footnote [2]

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

  38. 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.

    1. NB
      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.

      1. Stu 3
        Thumb Up

        Thanks

        I'll give it a go.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Question of semantics...

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

      1. Stu 3
        FAIL

        No, you're not a pedant...

        ...that was badly written!

        I meant to say that load times decreased.

  39. 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.

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    what about silverlight mr jobo?

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

  41. 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.

  42. 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.

  43. 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!!!

  44. richard 69
    Stop

    hitler was right...

    the ipad is rubbish...

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

  45. 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. Anonymous Coward
      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.

  46. 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.

  47. 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.

  48. 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...

  49. 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!

  50. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Happy

    @TJ1

    "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."

    If accurate this is very interesting. It also suggests the *obvious* improvement. strategy.

    Disable blending for all segments of the video stream that have *no* additional items, bypassing the additional steps.

    A vector based graphics langauge should have a *lot* lower bandwidth in terms of processing items (the 2 major reasons for vector appraoches are scalability and storage space) so it *should* be possible to walk through the list of objects to be created (and hence blended) into the video stream a *lot* faster than they need to be displayed.

    Caution. On a white board everything is simple.

  51. FreeTard

    linux flash is also shite

    My ancient but fab x31 cannot handle full screen flash vids, but they are fine in a window.

    All other vids play full screen no worries.

    Its definitely a flash issue, as FP1 above explained why.

  52. mafoo

    Liez

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

    Then you don't have any beta testers.

    Flash causes safari to crash constantly and causes firefox to draw to a grinding halt.

    Its the buggiest peice of &$@&! installed on my computer. How can watching a crappily encoded h.264 video consume 150% of my cpu resources on a 2.5ghz core 2 duo? The same video opened in quicktime uses about 15%.

    Please can people stop on insisting on using it. /cry

  53. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Yup i agree...

    So, Adobe has begun using the old Microsoft lines? "ooooh....well if our player wasn't good, it wouldnt be so widely used" = "oooooh, if windows wasn't any good, it would never be so widely used"

    Thats scraping the bottom of the barrel on the argument side a bit isn't it? Weak.

    For the record - Flash on Mac is just total CACK, no doubt about it. I used Click2Flash to manage flash loading in safari - ie block it as default - once blocked (only unblocking what you want to see / use) everything is sooo much faster.

    Windows Flash i generally don't have problems with at all..so all good there - linux no idea.

    I would really like it if Adobe actually did a proper version for mac....no, dont use the same code as in Windows, make it PROPERLY.

    1. Joel Fiser

      Let me try to explain how software works...

      For a suppose techie site, these people are well... technical dumb-asses. Let me try to explain how software works...

      A SWF starts off as a blank slate. Then, developers of varying skill levels write code...

      A highly skilled coder will write lean, fast and bug-free code...

      A less skilled coder might write bloated, slow and buggy code...

      Maybe Jobs should leave out the JPG standard since some people post huge JPG files.

      Don't talk authoritatively about software when you don't have a freaking clue!

  54. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Flash on Windows is slow, too

    Just run the same video in VLC, and you shall see the difference.

    Unbelievable how the (free, yet commercial) Flash player looses to open source software!

  55. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    My choice to use Flash

    @"multitasking"

    BZZT! *You* fail. Everyone knows the OS on there *could* multitask; if they only allow one or two apps that Apple provides to multitask, while everyone else's cannot, then it effectively cannot multitask.

    ---------------------------

    Anyway, this is why I will NEVER get a IPhone, IPad, or anything Apple related that I can. Flash is a bit of a POS, but it should be *my* choice to use flash or not, not Steve Jobs'. And, since I avoid his products, it is.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Grenade

      Just as it's Apple's *choice*...

      not to include a non-standard, buggy security risk into any of it's appliances! Is your lizard brain do the majority of your rationalisation? What is so terrible about that? Reading between the lines, had Apple based the development platform for iPhone OS on Flash (the GUI elements of OSX are based on postscript and PDF) you'd be crowing that Flash is unstable and Apple are idiots for doing so! You don't like Apple, THAT'S why you don't buy their products. It's ok! You don't need to justify to us why -- although I can guarantee it has something to do with Jobs being a prick, Apple's products being overpriced, "smug fanbois" or something equally as inane...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Coat

        I think you'll find..

        ..that the correct idiotspurt word is "fanboi's". History does not relate precisely what it is that they're supposed to own, sadly.

    2. My New Handle
      FAIL

      @Henry Wertz 1

      In the words of Captain Mainwaring ... "Stupid boy!"

      If you want to make a point then don't go on to show us all your deep-seated prejudices against anything-at-all-Apple. No one cares. Get it?

      Multitasking is not the be-all and end-all of an OS. Stability, reliability and, in the case of a mobile device, battery consumption are much more important.

      Regardless of whether it is Adobe Flash's fault or that of the websites hosting poor quality Flash code is irrelevant. The user experience is the same, crap. That developers of such websites struggle to write decent Flash code may well speak volumes about the weaknesses in Flash and its implementation for browsers.

      So the only Fails here are Adobe and your entirely subjective bleatings. Good luck with that.

  56. Andy Enderby 1

    html 5 codec disagreements....

    Flame away, or considered argument, but am I alone in thinking that part of the problem here is the big commercial interests attempting to leverage their own proprietary codecs ?

    Would the arguments be solved more quickly if the MS/Apple/Adobe sized commercial players in the field were marginalised, and a none commercial, open standard codec were forced on them ?

    Opinions please.....

    I can't see agreement being reached whilst all the big vendors are trying busily to piss on each others chips.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      open source

      Maybe, but open code seems to be a bit like generic drugs. They are great at making a more efficient "copy" of an existing product, but they dont seem to make completely new things.

  57. herry

    HTML 5

    This has been raised by previous poster.

    If Flash were to disappear and HTML 5 comes to light, how would one disable those annoying ads when it is embedded as part of HTML page?

  58. DrXym

    Nothing wrong with flash except its overuse

    Flash works just fine. The issue is that when you launch a lots browser tabs and each page has several flash components, things bog down a bit. Security wise it could do better, but part of the problem is people don't keep it up to date. I think Mozilla has the right idea by checking flash version at startup and strongly suggesting people to upgrade.

    Steve Jobs is just being hysterical and melodramatic to mask the real reason he doesn't like Flash - it competes with Apple's app store. After all there are countless apps, games etc. running on Flash FOR FREE and we can't have consumers "confused" by this profusion of choice now can we?

  59. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Oh Cock, over 100 comments - nobody will read this...

    .. ah well...

    Adobe, you 5ux0r5 dud35.

    That in-depth yet succinct analysis aside, it does beg the question, can HTML 5 replace Flash sooner rather than later?

    I, for one, would welcome the non-existent HTML 5 overlords - freeing content creators reliance on Adobes massively bloated, stupidly overpriced tool set to a plethora of video apps - both commercial and open source - and good old XHTML code layered with creamy Ajax lubrication.

    As a one-time worshiper at the dirty coal face of the Macromedia mountain, I was gobsmacked when Adobe took over - competition out the window then.

    Adobe took Flash, shoved up the backsides of several Adobe Developers and pulled out a turd based product disguised as something polished and shiny.

    They convinced us that this polished and shiny thing was the future of video on the web - that it would unite all us in a cross-browser cross-platform sea of lovin harmony and justice. (Well, they didn't actually say that, but they probably would have if it hadn't sounded so nuts)

    Now we're sinking in a mire of tube sites, our favorite purveyors of pervy pr0n have laid on the video goggles via the route of Flash, dropping those sad old virus ridden wmv, avi & mpg files in favour of advert & zombie payload ridden flashy streaming goodness.

    Then some crazy bloke pointed out the obvious about the iPad, touting pr0n as being a killer application via Flash - he got shot down in a haze of self appointed apologetic take down craziness, even though we all knew he was bang on the money.

    But you get my gist, right?

    Glad you do, I don't.

    Adobe, u 5ux0r5 l1k3 a b1tch 0n h34t.

    Apple, take your iPad and shove it in my pocket!

  60. randomhuman
    Linux

    Flashing Linux

    Flash slows things down quite a bit in windows for me, but in ubuntu it's a disaster, crashing so often that firefox became unusable because it had to be restarted every time. Thankfully opera runs the flash plugin in a separate process which can be killed independently of the browser. A refresh of whatever flash-centric page I'm trying to use has me back in business, with the added bonus that the bloated flash crap from all my other tabs has been cleared out.

  61. Anonymous Coward
    Heart

    Well that's alright then.

    "With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video."

    Praise Adobe! The honourable Adobe has graciously decreed that we the people can now use not one but two different operating systems on a whole family of 32 bit processors and still enjoy access to the Adobe Web. Resistance to Adobe's work in harmonising the global network can only be explained as a symptom of mental illness. Adobe's heart goes out to those whose loved ones suffer from mental illness, and urges anyone who knows somebody with chronic Anti-Adobe Syndrome to report to Adobe immediately so that their loved ones may receive the treatment they need.

    Signs of AAS to watch out for include:

    *Attempting to use the same computer for several years. This is probably due to an unhealthy interest in savings and/or the environment. They must be saved before they turn into Scrooges and/or activists.

    *Complaining about the heat blowing out of their computers, or the noise of the fan. See above.

    *Use of an operating system or machine which has stubbornly refused to be noticed by Adobe.

    *An unhealthy interest in mutilation. Frequented websites may be missing vital organs like adverts, pornography and games.

    *Distrust of Benevolent Industry Unity Caretakers like Microsoft and Apple. Except Apple. Apple bad. Sufferers of AAS reject Adobe's loving discipline. Left untreated they may become anarchists.

  62. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I was just playing a Flash game on my Macbook Pro and Safari hung

    as soon as I force quit Flash, Safari came back to life. Draw your own conclusions.

  63. proto-robbie
    Paris Hilton

    @ Adam T & Unity3D

    You had me going there for a bit Adam - downloaded Unity3D to my Mac, ran the beautiful live demo on their site, clicked to explore some more, then went to "Force Quit" to kill the dead, wretched fecker.

    And yet the pr0n sites work just lovely on my massive 24" iMac (with engorged RAM) without overheating, at least on its part: perhaps these guys should be working for Adobe?

    Paris, who can plaster me with mud any time she likes.

  64. Oscar

    I'm no fan of flash ...

    ... i'd even go so far as to call it a piece of crap. But isn't it a bit rich of Jobs to diss adobe's products when they release the utter crap that is iTunes and Quicktime?

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