Dear Flash plugin, love OSX

http://codesketch.com/2010/01/16/dear-flash-plugin-love-osx/

by g0atbutt • 17 years ago

99 65 17 years ago

g0atbutt• 17 years ago

Adobe is ridiculous. Flash on OS X is a joke. It makes sense why Apple is so hesitant to allow it on the iPhone.

Silverlight is even more unstable for me in Safari, and Flash is fine for me in non-Safari browsers. I don't know if this is everyone's experience, but on my part I'm more inclined to blame Apple and Safari than Adobe.

On the slowness front, maybe Flash is slower on Mac, but it's hard for me to fault Adobe on this either (even as a Mac user). If I had finite resources, I too would allocate more of those to the majority platform.

jrnkntl• 17 years ago

Silverlight is a breeze in Safari for me. It doesn't eat all of my CPU and the fans keep it down. When I watch a flash movie however on my Mac the fans kick in and it sounds like it's gonna take off or something. Click2Flash let's me load the m4v equivalent on youtube but that's unfortunately only for youtube.

alextgordon• 17 years ago

I just did a very unscientific test, playing the same video in both Safari and Firefox. In both cases Flash used approximately 50% CPU. For comparison, playing a higher resolution video in Quicktime yielded about 15% CPU.

roach• 17 years ago

I think it's one reason browsing the web can be so much better on the iPhone (try ESPN on the iPhone vs the desktop as an example). I hope the tablet doesn't support flash either and forces web sites to provide non flash versions of their sites.

mcav2• 17 years ago

Is there a technical hurdle that has given Adobe performance problems on OS X? Or is it really just the relative market share leading to few development resources on Mac?

peyton• 17 years ago

It's probably both. Couldn't find the source, but I remember it having to do with the OS X driver API and how it doesn't let you do the same kind of low-level voodoo that makes Flash work on Windows. And with limited resources, Adobe probably hacked something together that ran "Hello world!" and shipped it.

I'd like to hear an Adobe engineer's point of view.

lurch_mojoff2• 17 years ago

I don't think Adobe have given any explanation. Neither have they given any sign that they are working on fixing the performance and stability issues. It seems to me that Adobe's position can be summed up like this - "That's not a priority for us. Learn to live with it." As an example of this there is this mini-flamewar between John C. Welch and Adobe's John Dowdell: http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/06/doing_it_wrong.html

RWilson2• 17 years ago

I would really, really love to know the answer to this too.

It's hard to describe my surprise that my 5-year-old PC, with a low power 1.6Ghz CPU, can easily breach 100fps while playing JamLegend, and my 9-month old, dual-core 2.66Ghz MacBook Pro can barely squeak out 40fps.

Speaking of framerate in Flash, setting the framerate on a particular SWF does not actually make the SWF run at that framerate, even if the client machine can run at that framerate. Rather, the framerate seems to be more a measure of CPU resources dedicated to running the SWF.

For example, back to JamLegend: My MBP can run JamLegend at 40fps, but not if the framerate is set to 40fps. If it's set to 40fps, I'll get 20. It it's set to 60fps, I'll get 30. In order to get 40fps, the framerate has to be set to 100. Meanwhile, on my old XP machine, setting it to 40 gets 40, 60->60, and 100->100.

So, very good question, why is it that Flash performance is so different on OS X than Windows?

jdowdell4• 17 years ago

True on the framerate -- it's an upper gate. Static video which overburdens a configuration can drop frames to keep up. But interactive presentations need to display each intended frame, and so will drop framerate instead. More here: http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/05/frame-rates-in-flash-playe...

For the "why", that's Adobe Corp's tale to tell, but I haven't yet met a person inside Adobe who wouldn't be very, very happy if Mac/Win performance differences could be made to disappear.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

I'd guess any plausible explanation would also have to account for the fact that basically every Adobe product on the Mac has gotten much worse over time with the exception of Lightroom.

See this blog post, and the comments that follow for the comments of hardcore Adobe users:

http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/a-big-assed-post-about-fire...

tolmasky3• 17 years ago

Look, let's not kid ourselves, the problem is not technical. I'm sorry, but this stuff isn't rocket science, and even if it was, this plugin has existed for over 20 years, so they should have figured it out by now. Just think to yourself how much better the browser has gotten in that time frame, and its roughly how much worse the plugin has gotten.

The reasons are clearly either politics or incompetence. Now, I'm not sure what those politics might be. I don't personally believe that its that Adobe is "angry" at Mac or something, but I for example know that they are absolutely paranoid about accepting changes to the core code (even obvious crasher fixes require a ton of approval and consideration).

It really is to their own detriment. Regardless of how big the Mac market may be (its too big now to ignore and getting bigger), its a very powerful market of people that matter: i.e. developers. If Adobe got their act together, they would wipe the floor with JS, HTML5, etc. I mean, they almost do now, its purely due to their inability that they haven't completely and absolutely taken over the web.

Of course, the same can be said of standards. Taking 10 years to have any sort of measurable change on the W3C side is equally unacceptable (and we still ended up with a video solution that guarantees Flash will dominate this field for the next 10 years). Its always funny to me when people talk about whether "standards" or "flash" is winning, because it seems like a race where both parties are running backwards.

imajes• 17 years ago

really well said.

moe3• 17 years ago

this plugin has existed for over 20 years

14 years.

Regardless of how big the Mac market may be (its too big now to ignore and getting bigger)

Nu-uh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_sha...

because it seems like a race where both parties are running backwards.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1925723,00.ht...

ned• 17 years ago

For me the single best web experience improvement in the last year has been to install ClickToFlash: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

Suddenly, Safari didn't slow down or crash unexplicably, fantastic.

tfh• 17 years ago

flashblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433) is one of the first addons I install for firefox.

ianbishop• 17 years ago

I think the only thing that would make my Safari experience more wonderful would be ClickTo(Animated)Gif.

mcav2• 17 years ago

If you're willing to get rid of all gifs, toss this in your user stylesheet:

    img[src$=".gif"] { visibility: hidden; }

brandon• 17 years ago

Before there were dozens of decent ad-blocking extensions out there I was a big user of Privoxy. It had an action called "deanimate-gif" that would display only the first frame of the animated image.

I'm not sure if Privoxy was downloading the whole image in the background in order to extract the first frame, and I don't know if deanimation used less CPU or RAM than just displaying the animated versions, but I loved the feature regardless.

ugh• 17 years ago

Strangely, ClickToFlash makes Flash crash more on my Mac. Whenever I click on it the browsers stalls for two or three seconds, my hard drive goes crazy and then it might work. Or crash.

Since crashing Flash has become relatively painless in recent times (just reload the browser) I still leave ClickToFlash on, but it's a strange behavior nonetheless.

boundlessdreamz• 17 years ago

I have made a flash blocker for mac chrome. https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kfncbcioneejfnne...

cake• 17 years ago

I don't know if it's just me but when I open a new tab in the background in Safari 4.0.4, the Flash doesn't load, it only loads when I activate this tab. Which is a great thing, I don't some awful audio coming from the flash.

I don't feel the need of ClickToFlash on Safari.

The problem I have with ClickToFlah or Flashblock is that you can't see the first frame of a flash video.

Zak• 17 years ago

Anybody who thinks that sounds bad should try running Flash on a PowerPC. It can't play standard size Youtube videos at an acceptable framerate on a G5, while it provides acceptable performance on an Atom-powered netbook running Windows.

The situation on Linux is a little better, but performance and reliability are still poor. Developers should keep this in mind when choosing to use Flash as a cross-platform environment.

mortenjorck2• 17 years ago

My parents have an old G4 iMac. Despite its age, it has no trouble with high-resolution h.264 videos in Quicktime.

And yet QVGA Youtube clips play at about 3-6fps.

jdowdell4• 17 years ago

Too bad the original post doesn't accept comments.

Yes, Mac performance can be an extra challenge -- think of discussions in 3D, video-editing, or gaming communities. Things get more complicated when you're in a browser -- particularly on a Mac, you can see changing performance when changing browsers. Video will continue to further improve on PCs with hardware decompression, but on Macs Adobe is still hoping to persuade Apple to open those APIs to browser plugins. Adobe's own goal is to make things transparent across hardware/OS brands. And Adobe is interested in adding authoring-support for "HTML5": http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/06/adobe_on_html5.html

tumult• 17 years ago

google's opengl browser plugin, which works fine, speaks otherwise.

it's not an api problem. it's that adobe's software is shit.

larsberg• 17 years ago

The 10.1 beta2 for OSX is slightly less horrible (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/). It's still just as crashy, but slightly less CPU-killing.

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

Try Flash on Ubuntu. Things like VDPau are open source and can be leveraged for GPU acceleration, yet it's still not there. Besides video and games, I have zero clue what it's useful for. Shitty band websites?

tensafefrogs6• 17 years ago

You say that like "video" and "games" aren't a huge industry.

mortenjorck2• 17 years ago

I've worked in Flash for a decade. My experience with it has gone from dabbling with it in high school to experimenting with it in college to doing serious AS development in professional design work. I've come to a certain level of familiarity with and acceptance of its shortcomings, while trying to hone my sense of where it is and isn't appropriate to use.

And alas, it feels like that "is" part gets just a tiny bit smaller every day. For all its quirks and annoyances, Flash is a great environment and it opened the door to really rich web experiences long before the W3C ever imagined them. It still has a lot of advantages today, but the W3C is quickly catching up, and I get a definite sense that Adobe is losing the focus that Macromedia once had. They're continuing to develop Flash as if today were just a futuristic version of 2003. But Flash isn't going to stay relevant in a vacuum.

One of these days, someone (maybe even Apple) is going to come out of nowhere with a beautiful, visual HTML5 Canvas + JS authoring suite and Adobe is going to realize just what they've been taking for granted. And by then it may be too late.

saikat• 17 years ago

Some already exist. Check out Cappuccino (which I use and has been amazing) or Sproutcore (which Apple now owns, I think). There are others as well.

Tichy• 17 years ago

I for one can't wait for that day to arrive. Sorry about your livelihood, but I trust that you'd find it easy to retool for HTML5+JS.

amadiver• 17 years ago

Apple doesn't have a public API for Adobe to hook into to allow for hardware acceleration. As far as I know, there's nothing Adobe can do to remedy that situation.

Adobe wants to bring better video performance to the Mac, but Apple is not supporting them.

Here's the source: http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641

Entlin• 17 years ago

I don't buy that. Flash can do everything Parallels can, and - like the article said - inside Parallels flash is running faster!

tensafefrogs6• 17 years ago

So you are suggesting the Flash plugin starts up an instance of windows so it can utilize the hardware acceleration?

The issue here (with the 10.1 hardware acceleration) is that it requires updated video drivers, and Apple controls those drivers on OS X, and Apple hates Flash. Maybe they will eventually add support, but why would they hurry if they don't like it in the first place?

grinich• 17 years ago

The great thing about OS X development is that you're not restricted to public APIs. :)

nailer• 17 years ago

Adobe is really hurting themselves here. If most of the use of Flash on the web is video, content creators now have raw Theora or H264 in <video> as stable alternatives, with Flash becoming an IE-only fallback mode.

hoggle• 17 years ago

This might seem a little polemic - and it is - but I have been wishing Flash a quick death for years now. I simply hate it. No justification of existence for uncaring companies like that in the web of the year 2010. We don't need Flash!

freetard• 17 years ago

Dear Flash plugin and Adobe,

Fuck you.

jsz0• 17 years ago

This is exactly what happens when you allow one proprietary plugin to become dominant. I have no doubt that that it's not in Adobe's best financial interests to devote more resources to the OSX Flash plugin. It's a small subset of the market. Most users are just going to suffer with what they have. Adobe loses nothing by offering a subpar experience on OSX at this point. I understand it's not realistic to simply say "don't use Flash, ever" because open standards aren't entirely interchangeable with the wide range of Flash apps out there. That being said we should certainly be trying to minimize the amount of Flash used on the Internet. As an avid user of Click2Flash I find it's quite easy to avoid Flash the majority of the time.

Dear Flash plugin, love OSX

Related Stories