Adobe exec defends Flash, says Mac improvements are coming - Page 3

Utilities -> Grab

Capture -> Screen

It doesn't take a quad-core processor to play a Hulu episode. I did it many times on AMD's version of a P4, with a half-gig of RAM.

thank you. exactly...

You purchased a Mac. Mac's cannot handle Flash well, and this is widely known. Yet, it is a pastime for Mac users, and those who are on these forums, to berate Adobe. So who's fault is it? Is it Adobe's, for not bending over backward to the whims of Jobs, his needy customers, and the obstructiveness of OS X? Or is it your fault, for making the decision to buy a product you knew full well does not support Flash- a rich media format used extensively throughout the web? I have to tell you, my non-Apple desktop at home has much the same specs as yours, and Flash just works (to quote a familiar tag line). Do not complain about it after the fact, as you're doing at the very end of your post.

And as of yet, Adobe still hasn't released a Mac suitable version of Flash. From a business perspective, which do you cater to first? The 80% of the market which uses PCs and has very little to no issues with Flash and whose hardware can handle it? Or do you cater to <15% of the market which uses Macs, a company that openly chastises your product, and whose products feature software (and possibly hardware?) that cannot adequately handle Flash? I wonder.

As you said, your post also speaks for itself.

EDIT: misc grammatical stuff

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678&p=2

As you can see from the results below, CPU utilization drops significantly when going from Flash 10.0.32.18 to 10.1.51.45. Not only do the numbers drop, but playback performance (number of dropped frames) improves significantly. I’d say that all of the tests below were totally playable on the Ion system thanks to Flash 10.1.
Windowed Average CPU Utilization \tFlash 10.0.32.18 \tFlash 10.1.51.45
Hulu Desktop - The Office - Murder \t70% \t30%
Hulu HD 720p - Legend of the Seeker Ep1 \t75% \t52%
Hulu 480p - The Office - Murder \t40% \t23%
Hulu 360p - The Office - Murder \t20% \t16%
YouTube HD 720p - Prince of Persia Trailer \t60% \t12%
YouTube - Prince of Persia Trailer \t14% \t7%


These are awesome improvements. The Hulu HD results were a bit high but the YouTube HD test showed a drop from 60% CPU utilization down to 12%. Most impressive. Now on to the full screen Hulu tests:
Full Screen 1920 x 1200 Average CPU Utilization \tFlash 10.0.32.18 \tFlash 10.1.51.45
Hulu Desktop - The Office - Murder \t70% \t55%
Hulu HD 720p - Legend of the Seeker Ep1 \t83% \t68%
Hulu 480p - The Office - Murder \t70% \t70%
Hulu 360p - The Office - Murder \t70% \t70%

It gets far worse on a typical Mac. Your claims that there is no performance issue just aren't holding water.

No problem grabbing the screenshot (just push PrntScrn and save it).

But I can't figure out how to embed the image into a post unless it has a URL associated with it.

Although you don't seem to know it, even now, Adobe still gets a disproportionate share of its revenues from Mac users. At one time, Adobe got 75% of its revenue from Mac users, though it is much less now as Adobe built a larger business out of PDFs. Still, as Lynch said, they are one of the largest Mac software developers.

Allowing the Flash issues to continue and fester (and the slowness in moving to Cocoa) just reinforces the perception (and likely reality) that Adobe has become more PR talk and less action.

Mac users should respond appropriately by supporting alternate products that meet their needs, and help Adobe to further decrease its revenues and net income.

And that is how a corporate PR department spins a message...

Couple of points:

It doesn't seem to be the Mac hardware which is at fault: They use middle-of-the-road standard hardware on most Macs. It must be some other aspect of the Mac which causes the problem.

And Macs have nowhere near 15% of the market.

http://imageshack.us/

Very interesting data. Thanks.

And BTW, I have no idea of whether Macs are capable of playing Flash or not, or whether the performance issues are real or not - not firsthand anyways. I am just going by all the whining I read from Mac users.

It is very interesting that another poster claimed that all his stock Macs run Flash without issues. I wonder what accounts for that? He says that he has not done special configuration, which makes me suspect that other folks HAVE done something that screws up their Macs.

But I really don't know what the heck is going on or why Macs have such problems surfing the 'web.

Dear AppleInsider,

Until you come up with a method for downrating trolls these forums will continue to lose knowledgeable people who contribute useful information and instead become a ghetto of attention whores. Simply blocking an undesirable user is not enough because the thread will become fractured and newcomers will perpetuate the replies.

Give this some serious thought because these user discussions are in danger of becoming completely useless.

They don't have an issue browsing they web. They have issues with web sites that require flash. It has never been properly optimized. It performs better on a Windows machine, but even those are hardly desirable compared to simple H.264.

You're correct, I should have said software in my second point. As I semi touched upon in my first point, there is no doubt, in my opinion, that OS X goes out of its way to hamper Flash. If Flash can run fine on Windows and PC hardware, there's no reason why it shouldn't run fine on OS X and Mac hardware. As hardware between the platforms is mostly similar, the answer has to lie within OS X or at the very least Safari, although I admit I am not knowledge about the inter working of Safari.

As for 15% market share, I was simply being generous

Thanks. Here you go:

http://yfrog.com/3132893441p

Good point. What happens I wonder if you have Click to Flash but no Flash. Does it prompt for installing the plugin? I haven't ever seen the plugin install prompt on a Mac so I don't know. On Windows I think Flash can automatically install itself from the web page. Been a long time since I have looked at that feature.

According to your screenshot, Firefox is using 23% under Windows 7. That is a bit more than the 1-3% you quoted.

Fair enough.

I haven't checked the numbers lately, but Macs are probably still more than 15% of the market that Adobe sells software for, and definitely more if one excludes the PDF-based business productivity portion of Adobe's business.

In any case, it's material enough for Adobe to include Mac OS X sales in the risk section of their 10-K.

I assume you consider your earlier post contributing useful information.

hmmmm

\

Right. I said that I had clicked a link in the website before I looked at the CPU utilization. When I went back, I checked it out on the homepage, and it said 23%. The 1-3% was not correct for the main page, but instead, the link.

Just to put this into reference, I can run an entire Windows 7 OS on my Quad i7 in a virtual machine, and utilization is in the 3-5% range. I can open up that flash site, and it pushes my Quad i7 to 30% utilization.

It is beyond busted.

I don't think this is trolling - its a legitimate point. There may be a lot of Macs out there, but there are a lot MORE windows machines out there. As well as Apple has done and as much market share as they have gained and as good as their products are, their market share is still small compared to windows.

Adobe has very little incentive to spend a lot of expensive resources on %10 or less of the market. Its good that they are addressing it and showing some incentive to improve performance etc. They could comfortably ignore it over the small number of complaints primarily coming from a small number of mac enthusiasts.

Stop stalling with HTML5. You're using the old Washington technique of embrace and strangle. You support HTML 5 in the same way that Microsoft joined the MPEG 4 working group -- stalling and stalling and then leaving the group just before they came out with their own MP4 codecs (they were "better") just before the standards were announced. Allow video to default to Flash in the standard, in the interests of compatibility. But you won't do that, because that would mean that Flash would get dumped in a year.

Remember, Flash was promoted by Microsoft years ago in their quest to destroy QuickTime. Macromedia optimized Flash for the PC because Microsoft was their biggest customer.

If my Mac crashes it's always when Flash is running. Coincidence? I think not!

Because every Mac comes with Flash pre-installed. Are you sure Flash player installs itself automatically without prompting users to an Adobe page and asking them to install it?

I think the argument is that Adobe's implementation of the Flash plugin for OSX is the problem - that its gotten bloated and inefficient. In this case, it shouldn't have anything to do with the hardware OR the OS, but Adobe's code is the problem.

Especially with Flash, Adobe has to consider the whole market, not just the content creation market, in which Mac may have a little more market share than it does in the whole market. In the market that can consume flash content, Mac has nowhere near 15%.

He neglected to tell you he's running Windows, which has Flash optimised to run on the GPU courtesy of Adobe.

It wasn't always that way if anyone was an early adopter of 64 bit Windows XP there were quite a few issues back then, preceding that 64 bit BeOS and Linux users were even worse off, the only way to get flash to work was to run your browser in 32 bit mode.

btw that Jim Carry site will not run on the Adobe Flash for smartphones as the content is created for Flash 9 and the smartphone version of Flash 10.1 won't support it (It has already been abandoned by the team working on Firefox for Maemo), the site will have to be rewritten using ActionScript 3 compatible Flash.

Are you seriously going to state that millions of potential customers are insignificant to a business? Mac is probably one of Adobe's primary customers. They built their business on Apple machines.

You're also implying that these complaints come from a small number of 'enthusiasts' as you call them.

Let me show you about 6,000,000 people who would like to disagree with you.

If you want to bring Windows into it, here's 21,000,000 who have performance problems with Flash on a Windows PC's. The problem is not on Mac's alone. It is across the board on pretty much every major OS.

Most people don't purchase Apple computers with viewing Flash content as a primary concern. In fact, if you read through the thread you would see just how many users on this forum willingly choose to disable Flash content unless no alternative is available.

Being familiar with Flash/Actionscript and software development in general, I feel quite comfortable saying two things (the latter of which it seems Adobe's CTO agrees with): the Flash RTE is easy to program for but is generally inefficient, and its problems on the Mac don't point to Apple hardware (one of the most ill-informed trolling comments I have ever read on these forums). The ease of programming makes it simple for developers to create aesthetically pleasing sites that usually also sacrifice usability in many cases. The inefficiency further burdens some end-users on many platforms by making the web experience frustratingly slow. This especially applies to most people with a netbook (yes, even those running Windows XP). That's one of the fastest growing market segments in a bad economy, but since they are only paying $300 or so for a computer are they not entitled to reasonable Flash performance either?

A Windows computer (to include Apple computers with Bootcamp in my experience, which should be proof enough to anyone that hardware is NOT the issue, friend) runs Flash Player generally better than a computer with OS X. This is entirely on Adobe. I don't care what excuses they make, their code base for the Mac platform must be appallingly bad. When other software companies can make more complex programs, many of which are media based as well, run better on the Mac than on Windows it definitely casts a shadow over the development abilities of the folks at Adobe.

Throwing out the entire code base and starting over is generally a bad idea when fixing software, but Adobe needs to do something. We are entering an era where computers are not scaling upward in clock frequency, but wider in processing cores. It seems that Adobe did not account for that when "nurturing" the environment they acquired from Macromedia. If Flash is going to survive it needs true multithreading support for developers and a virtual machine that runs more efficiently than the current incarnation.

Yes, there are a lot MORE windows machines than Macs in the wild, but would you consider it a waste of resources when that 10% of the market makes up more than half of your revenue? By your logic, you would consider it a waste of resources even if only 1% of the market are Mac users but they make up of 99% of your revenue, wouldn't you?

You use that quote and say quit whining? Quit being a typical internet jerk. That guy's not whining.

I can't imagine doing some of the things in HTML5 that am currently doing in Flash.

Video is one thing, but interactive maps, etc., etc. I believe is a LONG time coming even if it does have ALL the capabilities of flash. And when is Microsoft going to have a browser that fully supports it? Version 9??

I've had to support a lot of flash actionscript ... if I could make an IDE that uses a couple of javascript frameworks and HTML and released it now as a Flash alternative ... it would make money (if it worked! ;-) )


What Adobe needs to do is to spend a lot of time/money and optimize and bug-proof their plugins on BOTH platforms as flash 10/Firefox on my windows box crashes more than my OSX box. I'd had to see all the bug reports in from Safari and Firefox where Flash is the culprit.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
( sung to the tune of Developers, Developers, Developers)


And ... are people that stupid to think that ads will disappear if they ban flash??? They got around the security of the popup window by using popup DIV's, they'll have even MORE fun creating HTML5 based ads and you won't be able to turn them off as easily as flash (clickflash, etc.).

As often as not, when I click on a ClickToFlash container in Safari (or FlashBlock in Firefox), I find there is nothing there because Adblock Plus, etc. has already filtered it out.

Well I already did my own tests as I said so I'm not sure anything you post would be helpful. Even if I gave you the benefit of the doubt and said I believed you, your result would be one single solitary data point, in a field of data points all indicating the exact reverse of your assertion. Anyone can look this stuff up and various tests that have been performed to confirm it.

Flash sucks up CPU cycles on the Mac to the point of ridiculousness (usually over 100% on a muti-cpu machine). It's just a fact. it has nothing to do with the browser, and nothing to do with the architecture or design of the OS. Flash is crap software. It's Adobe's fault for programming it that way.

These are all unassailable, proven points. Do some research and that's what you will find. I'm not going to go around the web looking for proof for you.

PS - to those saying that CSS can't replace Flash anytime soon, it easily could if someone would make a WYSIWYG tool for it.

If Adobe was smart, if they really *did* care about "open-ness" and if they wanted to keep their users happy, they would simply make an animation tool that exported CSS either instead of, or as well as, Flash files.

It's not that hard. Someone will do it soon now, it might as well be them.

+1

These forums have become a cesspool.

The only way Adobe can make Flash better is to stop redistributing that crap Windows 95/98 port and rewrite Flash Player completely from scratch using the Core frameworks that way they will gain access to hardware decoding of H.264.

They currently don't have the access because they are trying to do things their own way... in other words rehashing a 10 year old product.

That's why Adobe is lazy.

ROFL @ Adobe

How does it behave under Safari in Windows?
That would tell you if the culprit is Safari or not.

I'd be willing to guess that Flash is simply not optimized for OSX. Evidence? Adobe flat out refused to use xcode for how long, and are now complaining that GCC to Intel Mac takes some trivial amount longer to compile than Intel Win. Developing for Mac universal without using xcode is death on a stick, comparatively.

Curious to know exactly what about Safari is "going out of its way to hamper Flash."
That would be a very strange design criteria for a browser whose main selling point was speed.