The 'Help kill Adobe's Flash' campaign

Yes, Flash was designed to expect that processors would get faster over time and is a victim, just like everyone else, of the processor thermal wall limit.

The unfortunate side of things is most of the web got used to the creative control Flash provides and now has to code for a range of devices and capabilities instead of just regular computers.

What a lot of people might not know, netbooks with their under performing processors, have a hard time running HD video and Flash as well, so it's likely the iPad won't run HD video very well neither.

People owning the iPad with it's measly 1GHz and integrated graphics will suffer awhile, but as more and more hit traffic from the device hits server logs, it will become apparent to those sites that they to need to rethink their sites to appeal to the most people.

There's the issue of control though. For every new device that Apple makes, they have to wait on Adobe supporting it and hoping their implementation will be good enough. Content creation apps are the same.

Why do you believe that Apple's hardware acceleration is off-limits to Adobe when it is not off-limits to anyone else?

Didn't read the article? Adobe says...



Doesn't 3D gaming on the Mac also suffer from the same problem?

Adobe is conflating two unrelated issues. Linux developers have no knowledge of the specific hardware that it will be installed on.

Adobe would have you believe that Apple went to the trouble and expense of providing optional graphics cards, but then prevented anyone from using them. This is clearly ridiculous. If you parse Adobe's statement, then you will see that it is not saying what it is implying. Apple provides hardware acceleration via its graphics frameworks rather than through direct access to hardware. This allows any graphics app to run on any Mac. If the system includes hardware acceleration, then the graphics app automatically takes advantage of it. If your system does not have hardware acceleration, then the graphics run in software. Neither the developer nor the user need be concerned about it.

However, Adobe sees its software as platforms that make minimal accommodations to their hosts. It is Adobe's way or the highway. Adobe has been this way for more than 20 years--not only before Adobe bought Flash-developer Macromedia but also before Flash existed. Adobe's mercurial attitude resulted in losses then. It will result in losses to come.

No, it's kill Adobe's Flash, that makes multi-level sites that have only one URL, so you can't link directly to any of the site's sub-pages and always have to navigate your way (or tell others how to navigate their way) to where you want (them) to go.

It's kill Adobe's Flash that makes websites with fonts whose size and appearance you cannot change and whose text is not readable by screen-readers (accessibility fail).

It's kill Adobe's Flash that makes websites that you cannot copy and paste from.

It's kill Adobe's Flash that can be hideously CPU inefficient. Adobe would have you believe that hardware acceleration is a requirement for low CPU usage when decoding video. This is simply untrue. For small mobile devices, video decode in hardware is preferable as it maximises battery life. On computers with more powerful CPUs though, hardware acceleration isn't so important. For example, I watched the 720p version of this youtube clip in my browser - CPU usage = 150%. Then, I downloaded it and played it with VLC (which has no hardware acceleration) - CPU usage = 40 to 50%. I have a 2.4 GHz Penryn Core 2 Duo.

Right now, some HTML5 functions may be less efficient than some Flash functions. But you need to remember that HTML5 is a nascent standard and over time competition between browser vendors will lead to faster and faster HTML5 renderers. Flash has existed for years so it's not surprising that Adobe has managed to optimise at least some of it.

Well, clearly it's just too easy to make a deeply user-unfriendly site with Flash. I'll continue to lay a decent proportion of the blame at Flash's door.

The default behaviour should be to be more HTML like when it comes to basic site layout etc.


What, playing exactly the same video content with two different players? No, it's a perfectly like for like test which demonstrates that a.) Flash video-decode CPU usage is truly awful and b.) Good video-decode CPU usage does not require hardware decode assistance.



10.0.42

I was using VLC as a standalone app but it doesn't make a difference. In preperation for you getting upset about that I viewed the clip via the quicktime plugin in Safari (on Leopard, so not QT X) and that resulted in around 40% CPU usage.

If it ever gets out of Beta.

The main thrust of 10.1 seems to be sorting out the dire CPU usage on video decode. But if Adobe were so incompetent implementing a decent video-decode pipeline (especially when compared to open-source (= much lower resources than Adobe)), what else in the Flash runtime is incompetently implemented? What about CPU usage when processing Flash animations, transitions etc.? Does 10.1 deal with any of that?

And will 10.1 magically fix the innumerable Flash sites out there that have the accessibility and usability problems I outlined earlier?

10.1 (especially on Windows where it is GPU accelerated) is a revelation when it comes to CPU usage across a broad spectrum of sites, not just video playback. And no, 10.1 won't fix the poorly designed sites that use flash. Neither will HTML5 or anything else if the designers choose to continue to implement the features in those ways.