Adobe testing optimized version of Flash for Apple's MacBook Air - Page 2

haha, who's Apple's bitch now?

You don't understand how this stuff works. They are building a special client.

The MacBook Air currently runs Flash just fine. I'm not sure if it is performance that needs help, or if they want to tweak something to help with battery life.

There are many options for hardware acceleration on Mac. Flash uses only the very basic (it does more on Windows). One of Snow Leopard's point releases brought an interface to NVIDIA video hardware accelerator and that's what Flash utilizes. Yes, it doesn't work everywhere. Yes, it doesn't solve performance problems. But it does allow Adobe to proudly proclaim that Flash on Mac is hardware accelerated.

Now, if Adobe truly were trying to make Flash better they would follow OpenCL route. OpenCL code works on much wider array of graphics adapters, and while not as efficient as dedicated video decoding processor it would allow to speed up every other heavy aspect of Flash. And Flash needs it: Those 2 hours of battery life lost - they didn't play videos. It was just browsing. With ads. Personally, I don't think Adobe is up to it, because it's a major architecture change. Basically it would be simplier to write new Flash from scratch than try and fix the current one.

Adobe had it coming for a very long time. I remember when increasing the size of a flash video on my PowerBook G4 dropped framerate to 10-15 FPS. It wasn't higher resolution, mind you, just pixel doubling. THIS KIND OF OPERATION HAS BEEN HARDWARE ACCELERATED BY THE LOUSY S3 cards since 1994!!! Apple's core image API is incapable of drawing it THAT slow, unless programmer doing some incredible stupid stuff. And apparently Flash is written by the exactly that type of programmers.

I'm starting World of Warcraft and it takes about 5 mins for fan in MacBook to become audible. A particular site my GF likes with animated flash ads (no video!)? Always under a minute. And then this guy from Adobe comes out and tells me that animating those three objects in the ad and running a virtual machine for ActionScript takes higher toll than drawing, shading, rendering thousands of polygons in 3D space while keeping network up, parsing LUA scripts and doing Blizzard-knows-what-else. And that it is somehow Apple's fault. If all engineers in Adobe are like this guy then I won't event pity that company.

Hey, Adobe! Wanna see some browser plugin running efficiently and with hardware acceleration (not only for video) even on a mobile device? Look at Silverlight. And you know what? It has no future on the web too. Because it is a plugin. A patch to fix browser shortcomings that aren't there anymore. Flash, be it decently written could have survived without the web. But it won't. It will cling to farm games, while dying slow (hopefully, painful) death.

This is what Adobe should have done 4 years ago! I have no sympathy for Adobe, Nokia, Yahoo, AOL and on and on...

Best

Adobe will be under a lot of scrutiny. They need to get things right before they release.

Once I read Gruber's article, I did as he suggested and got rid of Flash on my Mac Pro completely. If I must use it, I open the page in Chrome as it does have Flash Player embedded. Doing it this way prevents Flash Player running in the background, and only using it when necessary keeps CPU usage low. This will work for Safari and Firefox.

Click to Flash is indeed alive and well and is now an extension for Safari instead of just a plugin. I use it on my Mac Book Pro as I use that mostly for media, if I am watching Hulu I only have the Mail app open, everything else is closed save Safari. I also watch Netflix on the MBP, I rarely have issues with Silverlight, strange that M$ can deliver a better media player than Adobe. The Mac Pro is my production machine and I usually have the whole Creative suite open and several other apps open. Creative Suite is another resource hog, but there is no alternative to that right now. Blocking the Flash Player completely has helped with performance. (this on a quad core 2009 model with 16 gb of ram) Why Gruber decided to not use Click to Flash is so the Flash player is not installed at all. Click to Flash still allows the player to load, but blocks the swfs from running until you click on them. Since my laptop is mostly for playing media I allow Flash Player to load, but only run a few apps on that machine. Crashing is almost non-existant, however what ever Flash player that Hulu uses is really junk, I have so many issues with it, the audio won't play, the ads don't load right, or they hang the page, on and on, stuff not working right. And if anything crashes it is the Hulu Player, no way would I pay them anything for their service, I have Netflix and they are adding more and more content daily and Silverlight of all things actually works well.

I'll admit I haven't used an OSX machine in several years, but I always thought mac users were blowing the whole flash issue out of proportion. On my windows box, playing flash video rarely pegs more than 30% of my CPU (granted I don't have the bandwidth for 1080p streams, so everything I watch is 720p or lower), and I figured it would be similar on the mac side.

looking into the issue a little deeper, it appears that there is a huge discrepancy between flash in windows and flash in OSX:
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.c...-depends-.html

I'm trying to find other sources to confirm those results, but if they are true, then something is definitely fishy about those numbers. Maybe flash really isn't optimized for OSX or maybe they really don't have access to the GPU; if adobe's "optimized version of flash for macbook air" could get CPU utilization to whats found on the windows side, then there really isn't much to complain about.

Sorry about that, my writing was quick and unclear. I meant to say he did not have click to flash installed for safari because safari, at least on his computer cannot run flash anyway so why have click-to-flash.

Which browser is having the trouble? Safari? Chrome?

Did you do his user agent trick Quite clever.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/ma..._mobile_safari

No it isn't, although you're right that labeling pretentious is completely subjective.

Actually, Adobe didn't have access to hardware acceleration from Apple until this year and they quickly put out a prerelease version of Flash player that took advantage of. On platforms like Windows where those APIs have existed for years, Adobe took advantage of it.

Inconvenient facts like that are not welcome here.

Here's another inconvenient fact: Unstable applications with access to low-level drivers can cause problems down to the OS level.

Anyone ever remember an Adobe application that was stable? Even the good ones?

<crickets>

& so they should. Apps are GUESTS of the system, they are not the system. That way us consumers get apps that play nicely together, that don't stumble over each other and that don't drain system resources as if they are the only kid in the playground i.e. we don't get apps that are as precious and short-sighted as their developers!

This is the real problem with Adobe they want to create a surrogate OS - a cuckoo! No thanks! Maybe they should release their own device.

McD

That's for video playback only. Apple have provided, and game writers have used, vector acceleration via OpenGL since 2002 & Adobe have only just picked up on the idea. On my non-GPU-accelerated iMac (the GPU's not covered) other video players use 15-25% of that required by Flash for similar & higher bit-rate video so no excuses.

McD

Are you serious? Adobe has Google/Android for mobile and 90% of all desktops, Apple will eventually succumb to Flash much in the same way they loosened the license. Be patient my Friend, Apple is sweating now, Steve Jobs never speaks on these types if issues unless he feels he's losing ground. Flash WILL be on the iPhone by 2011.

Hang on, surely this implies that Flash wasn't optimised for Macs & that SJ was right & Adobe were lying all along!

McD

"CPU usage skyrockets...." Jesus....don't be such a drama queen....give us a percentage....

And users are much happier for it because their devices actually work great!

This is completely false.

Adobe ALWAYS had access to hardware acceleration - just like any other application vendor. They had to use the appropriate APIs. Look up OpenCL, for example.

Adobe insisted on low level access to APIs that are not accessible to anyone else - and which are dangerous in the hands of Adobe's crappy programmers. So, Adobe is getting MORE access to hardware acceleration than anyone else-and Flash STILL stinks.

I've never heard that. Where did you get this info?

That is without a doubt not true and Adobe did not have access to the correct API's to invoke hardware acceleration. This isn't even something for debate.

Funny how when you run Safari for Windows you have no issues with CPU usage. This is an OSX problem not an Adobe/Flash problem. For those of use that use both Windows and OSX this is a clear as day.

He didn't get the info anywhere because he is talking about his ass like most in this thread. The issue has always been the fact that Adobe could not get access to the API's and hardware acceleration has worked fine on Windows.

Simple test. Run Safari for Windows and you will find there are no issues under Flash 10.1.

Read his post again. He's talking about OpenCL (which could be leveraged to accelerate video decoding) and OpenGL (which could be used to accelerate the processing of vectorised Flash animations)


Access to hardware decode of video really is not a problem. Play a 720p video at youtube (wait for it load completely before you start playing) and look at the CPU usage. Now play a 720p video in VLC and look at the CPU usage. Neither have hardware accelerated video decode, but VLC will have at most half the CPU usage of Flash. Why? Because VLC isn't coded by incompetent software engineers.

The real problem is not the incompetent software engineers at Adobe, but that Flash is so easy to use that really incompetent idiots can create flash apps, games and adverts. A bad programmer using any language can write code that will waste excessive amounts of CPU cycles and quickly use up battery power.

Most of this thread has been talking about video decode performance. If Flash requires twice the CPU utilisation as VLC to decode the same video data, there's no explanation other than Flash being incompetently engineered.

Apple is to blame just as much as Adobe. Apple did not release the info on the needed API's until this year. If Flash was that much of a problem and I am not saying that it wasn't, Apple should have provided that information a long time ago if they wanted this ressolved.

Flash runs without issue on Windows, I can even run Flash 10.1 without issues on my Android phone, the only time I have problems is when OSX is involved. Clearly OSX is part of the problem.

When I boot over into Windows on my MBP I get about 10% CPU utilization using Safari fo Windows. Clearly OSX is the issue.

Flash is only a topic of conversation on Apple forums, no one in the Windows for for that matter even Android world cares less about Flash, all they care about is they want their video to work. Apple is the only one having this issue because until recently they didn'[t want to give out the required information needed.

While Adobe has blame in this and has been lazy, Apple and SJ also shares in the blame.

Acutally the topic should be about improved battery life performace. Which is the topic stated in the article.

Whoa, that's the whole Adobe party line, in one post. Does Shantanu Narayen sign your paychecks?

I see many people here have little idea about hardware acceleration on Mac OS X.

Saying that Adobe didn't have hardware acceleration access until this year is just repeating Adobe's official statement. This isn't an "inconvenient fact", this is lies.

Since 10.6.0 there is OpenCL. This stuff is low-level hardware acceleration. The cost of development is high, and to reap its benefits you need skilled engineers who know what are they doing. Of course, Adobe wouldn't reform their development teams, hire new programmers AND redesigning Flash architecture just to be able to tap this technology on Mac OS X - the platform they haven't pay attention to for the last 10 years.

There were other options available too - "passive" hardware acceleration using Core Animation, Core Image and other Apple's frameworks which are hardware accelerated. However, this would require a complete redesign of Flash on Mac side. Adobe would have to develop another separate version of Flash for Mac with very little possibility of code reuse across platforms.

In other words, using existing options would cost too much due to Adobe's inflexibility in software development. So they made "there's no hardware acceleration accessible to us on a Mac" statement, pointing at Windows 7 and its video acceleration public framework. When Apple finally provided a similar high level framework on Mac, Adobe started using it in Flash 10.1.

And here comes the biggest Flash on a Mac issue: hardware acceleration didn't help it. You see, you lose 2 hours of battery life without playing video. It happens because Mac version of Flash is very inefficient piece of code from purely software point of view. Even more, this inefficiency is inherent to its architecture which lacks flexibility to offload workload to the high performance Mac OS frameworks.

Is it Apple's fault that they developed an OS which is so unlike Windows? Oh yes, absolutely. Is it Adobe's fault that they were saving money ignoring Mac architecture in their development while focusing solely on Windows? It is, indeed. And here come the rewards: Flash, as a development platform, is doomed unlike its peer - Silverlight. The biggest deployment base of Flash is the web, and the web don't need Flash anymore (for those who don't believe it google for video on the internet trends). Flash can't shift its focus to any other platform now, while Microsoft is happy to reuse Silverlight in the mobile space to much better results than Adobe. And this is only fair. Is it not?

Adobe should fix CS5 on Mac too. The fact that Windows CS5 bugs move along to the Mac says how dedicated they are.

Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. All rock solid.

Even Flash is stable as long as it's not running on OS X.

Optimized to run the battery down faster. Optimized for more security risks.

Seriously. Just because Flash runs OK on Windows and on Android means nothing. Adobe is lazy.

According to my personal experience with few Windows browsers and to google results for "flash crashes" it is not.

Also, I would like to ask for technical explanation on how exactly Mac OS X makes Flash player crash while other applications (using the same APIs, same frameworks, same everything on the same OS) keep running just fine? As a software engineer I can't find a viable explanation and tend to believe that Adobe feeding us BS.

Facts based on my personal experience and on the experience of many others reflected on the web, and also professional programming knowledge leave me in no position to invent a single excuse for sub-par quality of Flash player on a Mac. Putting it simple, it is sh*t.

deleted

I've done this and it makes a huge difference. As I understand it, if you use "Click to Flash", the website thinks you are using flash, as it does load, just somehow doesn't run. If you get rid of Flash altogether, then when you visit the site, you get static advertisements, less to download and the site will not assume you enjoy using Flash. The trick that Gruber uses to activate Chrome works great. Adobe flash is no longer on my laptop, and Chrome seems to do a good job of keeping the CPU cycles reasonably low when I visit the few sites that require flash.