Adobe’s Flash technology has been taking a beating lately. Apple still won’t support it on its upcoming iPad or its iPhone. Steve Jobs calls it buggy and crash-prone and dismisses Adobe as being lazy. Adobe is trying to fight the negative vibes emanating from Cupertino and elsewhere. It has already pointed out that it will be easy to convert Flash apps into iPad apps, and now CTO Kevin Lynch is weighing in to defend Flash.
In a blog post today, Lynch addresses the two major threats to Flash: Apple’s refusal to support it on mobile touchscreen devices and the rise of HTML5 as a new, open standard which may one day replace Flash. On Apple, Lynch says Adobe is ready and able to put Flash on the iPhone, the iPad or anything else Apple can throw its way. But, as has been the case for more than a year, the ball is in Apple’s court:
We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.
Lynch points out that the next version of Flash for smartphones, 10.1, is about to become available and that practically all other smartphones will support it, including Android, Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm Pre. If they can handle it, why can’t an iPhone?
But the bigger long-term threat to Flash is HTML5, especially for rendering video. Lynch says that 75 percent of video on the Web currently is shown in a Flash player. That number could decline if HTML5 video starts to take off. Google (via YouTube, Chrome, and other products) and others are pushing HTML5 hard. Lynch tries to pretend that HTML5 is not a threat, saying in the same breadth that Adobe supports HTML5, but its incompatibilities across browsers spells doom for the Web. He writes:
Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.
HTML5 is still a young technology, and those incompatibility issues can be solved over time. Flash is still a more capable technology when it comes to rendering video, but HTML5 is advancing faster and as a native Web standard it has many other advantages which may help it win over time.
Adobe is in a battle for developers, who buy its Creative Suite software to make Flash apps. As long as Flash is the de facto standard for video and animation on the Web, those sales will not be threatened. But if Flash developers migrate to other technologies to build better apps for the Web and mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, Adobe’s competitive position will be weakened. It will defend Flash to the death.
Photo credit: Flickr/Bill Tyne.
“Adobe’s Flash technology has ben taking a beating lately.”
From Apple fans, no-one else really gives a shit.
Um… I am using a Dell right now and I run into Flash errors fairly consistantly. Not in video playback usually. It happen mostly in ads and interfacing loading. Same on my Mac.
Smug and wrong are not a pretty combination.
But doesn’t owning a Mac make you an Apple fan? It has worked fine on all Windows machines for me. Maybe because I have no Mac.
Not certain. I own a Pontiac but it doesn’t make me a Pontiac “fan”.
And if you read my post you’d see that it happens on my Dell laptop too. I also have a Toshiba laptop and an eMachine desktop… tell me… does that make me a Windows “fan”?
Fair points. Sorry about the Pontiac.
I also am a Windows user so I haven’t experienced the crash problem, but if Flash is really as bad as the Apple fans are claiming, it deserves to be called out.
I can appreciate that sentiment because as an iPhone owner, I am *forced* to use iTunes, which on Windows is loaded with annoying behaviors (some people might even call them bugs) and background processes that slow down or hang my PC. If any other company but Apple forced me to put up with that, I would complain bitterly!
Perhaps, just watch out when those ‘fans’ started to decrease when they realize that flash, gives them a lot of headaches for their iDevices.
I gotta say that flash as a whole is definately not stable and alot of websites problems come from poorly written flash scripts so I would have to agree that Flash must be upgraded. Although, ‘eliminating’ it totally in the internet, like what other’s are proposing is pure BS.
HTML5 still lacks some capabilities which the Flash does more smoothly, so my take? Improve both technology and see how this one rolls! More details: http://bit.ly/apple-ipad-scrutinized-details
Toshiba is first big mistake. No more complaints. You have earned your errors.
No, it makes you a Mac owner. You apparently have Windows machines, does that automatically make you a Windows fan?
whooooosh right over Long’s forehead.
LOL, Chris.
I think it makes you a Mac fan. Why else would you pay more? Most people get PC’s with windows because it’s cheaper, it’s what they already know, and it is the default. Sort of like Pontiac. Mac is more analagous to BMW. Why would pay more if you aren’t a fan?
“I think it makes you a Mac fan. Why else would you pay more?”
Steve ?
Steve Ballmer, is that you ? ^_^
I pay more because as my primary (although older) PC the Mac just works. Almost everything is easier on it. And most of the things my family uses it for done with tightly integrated applications (iLife). It is more elegant in accomplishing the most mundane of tasks. That is subjective, I know.
The simply truth is that Mac and Windows PC are not the same. The OSs make them starkly different. It is something that people who see all PCs as toasters don’t seem to understand. I certainly understand they cost more. That’s why I own some Windows PCs. Depending on why I am buying a computer will determine which computer I am buying.
My daughters in college both have MacBooks. My wife has an iBook (about to go bye bye) and I have the two Windows laptops, and Mac and Windows desktops. And my wife and I both own iPhones (we had AT&T when they came out and haven’t had any issues with the service in Chicagoland).
I try to find the tool that fits my need. In the end, though, I always find myself going back to the Mac for stuff outside of surfing and email (creating stuff!). Just a preference, I guess. I doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Because maybe they have money to waste? Or are looking for a change in OS’s. I bought a mac not being a mac fan. How could I be a mac fan when Ive never owned one? Now I do.
I pay more because I want a quality machine that works!
@Chuck A
A lovely, common sense post. Thankyou.
I own an Imac – and it doesn’t make me a an apple fanboy. I bought it because nobody else makes a desktop that’s not an eyesore. I mean a desktop is furniture. Ugly furniture makes your house look bad. There are, however, plenty of decent looking laptops out there that are better than macbooks on features, and looks just arent as important in a laptop, mobility is king. Let’s see : Mac laptops are HEAVY, with that ridiculous track pad that you have to click on with all your might. What else… awkward and poorly integrated menu options and inferior device support. The one lightweight mac laptop, the air, has no removable battery and mediocre battery life. My current pc laptop is 3.4 lbs 13″ LED screen, i regularly get 9 hours of battery, has a speedy dual core processor and a removable battery. And it looks decent, thin, clean and unadorned. it cost me $750 – cheap enough so that i can toss it out and pick up the latest hot trash the moment it hits the streets.
Bobby… You are absolutely right!
Ahahha… This is my first TC comment after 1 year of reading.
Except the problem is…. After getting one, I’m starting to think that maybe I should change the table because it looks ugly compared to the iMac.
This fanboy thingy is getting old. Most people (I dare say) buy things that work for them and make them happy. I love my macbook but absolutely hate iPhone (N1 is my drug), people are always fighting because someone made a comment that somehow criticized the other dude’s product.
Nothing is perfect right? Just be happy… =D
I’m running a Windows 7 PC, a Windows 7 netbook, and a Windows XP laptop and, while I have had Flash crash in the past (haha, I can rhyme!) I haven’t seen any errors in several iterations of the software (I’d say I’ve been “Flash error free” for at least 3 years now).
While I am sure that such errors do exist – all software can break given specific circumstances – I am not sure as to what capacity they exist. What are the errors? How do they originate? Are they reproducible? Is your hardware or software configuration the problem or is it actually Flash?
I would say nearly all errors seen in Flash are code related where a developer was making assumptions about something and didn’t write code that would handle unexpected inputs. I would not be surprised at all if this is what Steve Jobs is speaking of. You see this in javascript all the time and safari on iphone still supports that.
Apple handles this by reviewing all the code that goes onto the phone. Adobe should review all code that goes onto the web!
“Adobe should review all code that goes onto the web!”
Oh, please, NO.
I’ve been incredibly disappointed in flash video playback performance. Videos that play completely smoothly standalone are choppy as hell, even sometimes on new systems. Hulu and the comedy central players freeze in fullscreen randomly or fail to load videos. Not to mention that since every site uses its own player, there is no consistency in interface, starting/stopping video, or handling timeouts.
I personally have seen no benefit in the switch to a flash player compared to the old way of embedding a quicktime, realmedia, or windows media stream. The user still has to download a plugin to run it, the only change is that people are for some reason more willing to install flash than a legitimate video player.
Mike, the reason people are willing to install Flash is
1, before Adobe bought it, Macromedia paid everyone from Apple to Microsoft to include it with their OS
2, Flash players were small. It used to be only 300k.
3, Macromedia used to give it away the authoring suites to schools.
4, Flash installation was seamless, did not need browser restart.
5, Flash has lots of games.
x64 and Flash don’t play well together, even in 32 bit browser (no 64 bit Flash anyways). Maybe it’s anecdotal but numerous x64 machines I have contact with have Flash problems.
I run XP64 and have no problems whatsoever on my current i7 rig, nor did I have any problems with Flash on my previous Core 2 Quad. Maybe I’m browsing the wrong sites?
I have only had problems with Flash when it was a flash based game or something similar. And usually only when I was on wifi. so blame it on dropped packets or connection hopping.
The Mac vs PC thing is tired. Mac’s are really not that much more expensive than PC’s if you compare similarly fitted machines (with software!) of the same quality. Comparisons to emachines and Acer are just silly. OTOH Macs don’t just work. I don’t know how many times I have had to rescue friends and family members because they bought a “Mac compatible” device that needed more than plug-n-play interaction to get it working. They also are not virus immune. I have seen an entire mac lab taken down by a virus. There also are several trojan variants out there in torrent land that turn you perfect mac into a rogue DNS.
Reality, apple is retarded for not letting flash play on iphones/ipods/ipads. Especially since Adobe CS had got to be one of the leading software packages people buy Macs to use. But it’s not a Mac only suite. What if Adobe, out of spite, just delayed the mac version of CS5 by a few months just to be jerks? Ot made the copy protection more onerous since the Mac platform has got to be their number one piracy concern. (really, did you PAY for that copy of Photoshop on your Mac?).
Some software requires an iLok or other dongle scheme in order to work.
And yes I dont use iTunes on my PC anymore because of Bonjour and other such bloatware crap. My Mac mini is my dedicated iTunes box now.
“What if Adobe, out of spite, just delayed the mac version of CS5 by a few months just to be jerks?”
Past tense – This has already happened. Adobe and Apple have been playing games such as the above since the late 80’s. I think it began with Truetype/TrueImage – an Apple/Microsoft collaboration which targeted Adobe’s PostScript dominance.
Note also recent stories about BING becoming the default search setting on Apple products. Could that have anything to do with a falling out with Google? Nah! Surely not!
Wow, thanks for your isolated example!
I use Windows desktops and laptops and a Macbook under Windows and OS X. I’ve only had issues with Flash using the Macbook under OS X.
Why? I have no idea but it seems to be a common issue across the intarwebs whereas, despite their far greater volume, Windows PCs do not appear to have the same level of issues.
Of course, when I say the Macbook has problems I mean that it occasionally has problems, not that it crashes ‘fairly consistently. If your PC and Macbook are crashing ‘fairly consistently’ then that suggests more of a PEBKAC issue to me.
Best lay off the streaming goat porn for a while, eh?
Please remember that Job’s claim is that Adobe is being lazy in the their IMPLEMENTATION OF FLASH ON MACS IS BUGGY!
That is true. I constantly get flash errors on my mac.
but adobe is doing their best to fix flash. whatever updates they have adobe will not accept/will recieve but won’t roll out to their devices. so then how is adobe supposed to continue to fix their flash problems. flash isn’t perfect, but then nothing really is. a lot of the problem with flash is that there are a lot of bad coders who create via the internet and it’s bad not only for adobe, apple, but for all of us.
apple will not accept…
Probably the same way Apple is lazy with their implementation of iTunes on Windows. That software is completely bloated and runs like a slug.
that cannot be. Macs just work.
It couldn’t be that your system has a bug in it or perhaps a corrupt/outdated flash or browser installation. Naaaaw. Couldn’t be. Flash crashes for everyone. (NOT). Fix your computer or get another one.
Flash errors on Ads (which typically use interface loading) are good things: NO ADS.
A FF/Chrome/IE/Opera handle those errors it gracefully, so you get ad free pages by default. It’s funny, and it not bad actually.
As long as flash navigation and multimedia/videos work, I think people will be just fine.
Just because you ran into errors doesn’t mean its a Flash issue. It could easily be a bug introduced by the developer of that ad or app or whatever you are looking at.
There is nothing more wrong about Flash than other software. They all have bugs, Flash is no exception. However, I’ve been developing in Flash for many years and it is a very stable platform, even on Mac.
Most people don’t consider that SJ might be bad mouthing Flash simply because they don’t want the competition in their app store.
You are right: “Smug and wrong are not a pretty combination.”
Everyone else is using Adblock or ClicktoFlash to avoid Flash, so yes, no-one else really gives a shit (about Flash).
@Paul Chapel: “Everyone else is using Adblock or ClicktoFlash to avoid Flash, so yes, no-one else really gives a shit (about Flash).”
Except for that fact they are using third-party software to avoid it.
Is that really your closing argument?
I just don’t get it.most people who I know(I mean normal people not geek)…..they don’t even know adblock or ClicktoFlash exist.
If you had not mentioned I would have never known either.
i’ve been using that for a long time but i can tell you none of my friends, schoolmates (minus the nerds), or extended family (aside from my nerdy cousins and my brother) know about clicktoflash. there are a lot of average users using the net…and if something goes wrong they can’t even begin to tell you what the problem is. they will just say it crashed and they might notice flash but they actually won’t know specifically why the browser and computer crashed.
You’re right. They help us block the Flash sites we don’t want whilst enabling the ones we do.
How does that choice work on the iPhone or iPad again?
You do realize that the developers of those apps you love get paid when you view those ads, right? And that by blocking them, you’re basically using their product and stealing from them at the same time, right?
Oh please. It would only be ’stealing’ if clicking on those ads was mandatory under the law or stated in some sort of EULA that you would have to opt in to before using the site. Next you’ll be trying to tell me that by putting the TV on mute during commercials I am stealing TV.
+1. What if I click on an ad that I don’t really care about just to support the developer? Am I stealing from the company that paid for the ad?
I think most Firefox users have been using adblock for almost as long as they’ve been using Firefox.
Personally, I count on IE users to subsidize me across the board.
So I assume you’re using those flash-blocking plugins with Firefox? If so, good luck viewing videos online after “HTML5 kills flash”. The sites using HTML5 are feeding the same h.264 files that their flash player uses. And FF doesn’t support h.264.
Then he can just use Chrome. What’s your point?
Sure it can. All it will take is some greasemonkey magic.
It does matter to a lot of consumers. HTML5, Flash, Java, Silverlight, Objective C all have their place. The developer hysteria is getting a little ridiculous…
http://anthonyfranco.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/mass-confusion-the-hysteria-over-flash-silverlight-html-5-java-fx-and-objective-c/
Consumers don’t care – they just want it to work with minimal hassle. They could give two craps about how its developed.
I’m getting the feeling you’ve actually had to work with customers or managers/partners with no tech background. In their case the devil is the details.
in their case the matter is why they are still afloat as business – these kind of clients http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com/ must go biowaste
Listen to last 2 week’s TWIT podcasts, kid. Flash blowz — it’s a CPU hog and crash machine.
HTML5 is the future — a much fast, and more stable future.
There is no reason to assume that HTML5 will be faster and stabler than Flash. You can write bad code in any development environment.
Another big issue will be that Kevin is absolutely correct that Adobe has a big advantage in being able to update the Flash plugin very quickly and across all browsers simultaneously. It’s going to be a total nightmare keeping the 4 or 5 major browsers running the same version of HTML5.x as updates are required. Good luck!
It’s also misguided to think that Flash is ONLY about video. I think people would be surprised at how much of their daily web experience is Flash driven…
Google Maps street view = Flash
SlideRocket & SlideShare = Flash
Google Finance = Flash
Flickr Slideshows = Flash
Playhouse Disney = Flash
Zynga Games = Flash
MySpace = Flash
Ultimately, i think the point that Apple is missing is that while HTML5 may become a player eventually – we are YEARS (if ever) from seeing Flash disappear from the web. I highly doubt the iPad will see enough traction to drive all these companies to reauthor huge swatches of their sites in HTML5 anytime soon…
Agreed. Cogent analysis.
gmail file upload = Flash
In fact for any decent file upload (multiple file select, upload progress, file filter, etc.) you need flash.
And that’s a basic html functionality, nothing near the complexity of video.
Very good point.
As a web developer, watching javascript performance and css animations improve. It seems feasible that HTML could solely replace flash. But you are correct, we are YEARS away.
Will it happen? Its completely up to all these big companies.
But I am sure about one thing. Adobe is very biased in this matter, its not about innovation to them. If Flash dies, so does a lot of their revenue.
Google maps is not Flash btw. Actually with all these examples you pointed out there are lighter but more powerful alternatives that don’t rely on plugins
But true.. There are a bunch of things in Flash. But don’t kid yourself it’s not like the web is driven on flash. If you take the video part away then Flash is the exception. I would not be surprised to find out that over 95% of Flash embed tags out there link to ads. And if Apple refuses to put Flash in the iPad and it becomes one fifth as popular as the iPhone you can count on advertisers to abandon Flash in a matter of seconds. Because they don’t care if its running on Flash or not. They want to reach the customers. I dare you to find me a single company that is looking into advertising on the internet that will be ready to say that having their ad run in Flash is a deal breaker.
What Adobe needs to do is to do the smart thing and get in the HTML5 game. They make great tools and SVG and Canvas badly need some developer tools.
“Google maps is not Flash btw.”
Yeah but Street View – which is what he was talking about – is.
You need to do more thinking and less typing. A good start would be on your ridiculous premise that the iPad selling a bit under 2 million units a quarter is going to make advertisers consider their main delivery mechanisms.
I defy you to point to any of the sites I gave examples of and show me a more powerful alternative that doesn’t use a plugin.
The point remains that Apple can not claim the “best” browsing experience on the iPad without Flash support until Flash is 100% gone and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Can you imagine what a nightmare Apple support will have when this obviously consumer-targeted device gets in the hands of millions of users who don’t understand why a significant portion of the web doesn’t work for them. It may not impact sales but it’s still an arrogant and bonehead move.
Quite the astute synopsis my man.
They can update it quickly, but do they? How long did they sit around and justify not doing a 64-bit Flash, and even now there’s just a 64 bit alpha version for Linux? (And while it beats a 32-bit version with a wrapper, it’s still buggy, and those Zynga games are dog slow.)
“There is no reason to assume that HTML5 will be faster and stabler than Flash. You can write bad code in any development environment.”
please don’t use your assumptions as truth-in-last-instance — Flash is not free (i.e. can not be changed without Adobe moving fingers) and will always be a plugin, hence they will never be anything but sluggish, unreliable piece of Adobe inserted here and there, until we have guts and kick their arse off the web, substituted with clean, simple, yet well-defined open standard. Yes, it also means Adobe goes back it Photoshop&etc caves, and Flash site designers have to go classes or change job.
Thanks, Danno. I guess I’ll just go by my experience of using it on a variety of platforms over the last ten years or so rather than the ill considered opinions of some halfwits on Twitter if it’s all the same to you though.
I don’t care whether flash is buggy, I just want the CHOICE to USE it if I WANT to…Apple restricts my choice and makes the decision for me (iPhone, iPad).
I’ll take an imperfect freedom over a perfect cage.
Like with all new technologies…time will tell
Does anyone there use flash on a Mac? Forget the iPad and all that, Macs alone are reason enough to move to HTML5
In Video only you mean, Flash had already been there even before video streaming
I have macs, and have used them for 5 years or so. I’m a web designer, and use flash cs3 on my macbook. Never had any issues online or in development. Mobile wise though, my iphone lacks the player which sucks, but there are always other options.
Sorry but BS.
There is not a statistical chance in hell that you have been using a mac and never had a Flash problem.
Are you saying that Safari has never crashed for you or become slow. If it has then in 90% of the time it’s because of Flash.
I use a Mac but not Safari (Chrome4Life!) and haven’t experienced an actual crash caused by Flash itself. I’ve seen the Flash plugin itself die from time to time, but that’s about it.
In terms of performance, Flash is PAINFUL when it comes to CPU utilization and resource management – especially on OSX.
Perhaps he actually writes decent code.
J, he means Flash is a resource hog on Macs, compared to PCs. This is generally true, as Flash on PCs has access to hardware acceleration to speed things up. OS X doesn’t allow Flash access to hardware acceleration.
Flash enables the major competitors to Apple’s revenue stream (i.e. free Hulu & Flash games vs. paid iTunes content). Thus, Apple has a lot to gain by suppressing Flash on its mobile devices and making the Flash experience less enjoyable within OS X. Unfortunately, both Adobe and us Apple users pay the price.
You nailed it my friend! Jobs and Co. is all about the greed, baby, If Apple can’t completely control the revenue flow, they try and squash it. Capitalism to the nth degree….
You’ve absolutely got a point there. Flash on the Mac is bad. It doesn’t matter if you use Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Video stutters… lags… crashes … and hogs the CPU.
That said, it’s not like it’s an Indy car on Windows either. I’ve routinely seen it drag my system to it’s knees as well.
Let’s look at flash for what it is: It was a unifying technology that pulled out out of the stone age of video on the web, and gave us a viable way to present movies.
Now we’re pushing beyond 320 x 240 clips and in to 1080p theatrical releases, however. We need more that Flash can provide.
Let’s thank Flash for helping us climb out of the stone age, and then push it aside for something better. Right now, that looks like HTML5 and H.264.
How does html5 “replace” flash?
it doesnt but it offers a viable alternative to stream video, you can try this now, think youtube have a html5 player with some limitations
I believe it uses a browser-based codec to decode embedded video, regardless of the video format. The issue Flash-man brings up is that different browsers are currently supporting different codecs, all of which or HTML5 compliant. Safari supports H.264, Firefox does not, Chrome looks to be moving to OGG, etc.
I do think, given the age of this standard, that the parties will settle on one. And then the days of Flash will be numbered for video.
Someone else have a better description?
The above argument is identical to: All the browsers will settle on a single rendering engine and the days of HTML standard incompatibility will be over.
OR: all users will standardize on a single OS.
and so on and on..
From a developers standpoint, Flash does indeed provide a reasonable similar experience across browsers and OSes which is a huge win for them.
Dude seriously, all browsers except internet explorer have about the same rendering. Internet explorer will at some point follow the development, it’s just a matter of time.
So less than 40% of browsers have the same rendering? And for those 40%, when I design a standards-compliant website and it looks different in Safari and Firefox, that’s my imagination?
Yes I think when Lynch was referring to agreeing on a format, he was talking about the codec problem.
It’s easy to hand wave and say “time will fix it”, but it is quite a thorny issue. H.264 is proprietary so will never be usable in the non-profit Mozilla Firefox. Also, it’s not really in any company’s interest to migrate to a common standard. Will Apple make Quicktime defunct for the greater good? Not likely.
Take audio codecs as an example, which are a little more mature. Rather than migration to a standard format, there’s now more audio file formats than ever.
Flash contains half a dozen video codecs.
It can, but 99% is on2 VP6. There are a million codecs and always have been, but gravitation is toward new/more efficient ones. Seen a lot of MPG-1 videos floating around in the last 5 years?
HTML5 will enable embedding videos simply by using the tag. You can check out YouTube’s “demo” of YouTube in HTML5 @ http://www.youtube.com/html5 or see more demos here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sublimevideo_demoing_the_future_of_html5_video.php
Of course the authority on this is at w3.org so I do recommend hoping over there and reading up.
Thanks for the link. I checked out a few YouTube vids in HTML5 (using Chrome). They were pretty pixellated, and full-screen doesn’t work yet. Not sure if this is due to multiple format conversions, restrictions placed by Google or the underlying technology. Any ideas?
It all comes down to the flavor of codec.
The problem being there is no common codec for HTML5.
See http://tech.icrontic.com/news/no-common-video-codec-for-html5
And Flash has no “standard” codec either. It contains half a dozen codecs.
Your retarded, flash video nowadays uses H.264 or the old VP6. The odd old vid will be sorenson from flash 7 and below days.
Do some research before the hate.
So? Fine, it’s a tag, but even then you’re using a codec instead of a plugin. Not a huge difference IMO except the codec is bundled as part of the browser but still comes from a 3rd party.
The codec isn’t part of the browser. The decoder is. HTML5 punted on specifying the video codec because the browser guys can’t agree on which one.
So the issue here is that unless you encode your video in both H.264 and Ogg and whatever MSFT decides and possibly whatever Google releases via the On2 acquisition, certain browsers won’t be able to play your video and it’s welcome back to web circa 2001.
Choosing a suitable codec is proving difficult in HTML5 because for many the best hope of a resolution, the Ogg Vorbis codec, *may* be subject to submarine patents (AKA future Patent Trolls)
It turns out that all video codecs are patent encumbered. With no royalty free codecs this issue isn’t looking resolvable in the near future.
So someone like to create a new audio & video codec and disclaim all IPR? Way to make yourself famous
Google may release a high-quality, open-source codec using On2 code but will IE support it?
There are many things in FLash that have been standardized in HTML5 via a variety of processes that do the same thing that the Flash web browser plugin currently does. For example, to do video there is the video tag. To do accelerated 2D drawing there is the canvas tag. To do 3D in a browser there is WebGL. All of these things are embedded into the browser code as opposed to the browser being a stupid renderer and requiring plugins for everything. HTML5 pretty much takes the best of everything that people wanted to do and brings it into HTML5 tags.
Both Android and the Palm Pre are plagued w/ battery life issues (made significantly worse when viewing Flash on the device), and from what’s been put out there even from the Firefox team, Flash Light is not ready for prime time. Adobe needs to put out something stronger than a blog post in order to satisfy developers like Firefox.
too bad flash 10.1 isn’t even on those devices yet. So you are mistaken.
Yes. and they are lazy… where is cocoa for Adobe CS? lazybones…
I use Flash on a mac… it crashes on certain apps, but what does that have to do with Flash? A poorly written app will crash even if it is written in Objective-C, Actionscript or any name you want to throw in here…
Flash is not being supported clearly for being a treat to the App Store.
Apple banned Flash from the iPhone before they ever decided to do an App Store. So what does this have to do with the App Store?
And you think the App Store was thought after the iPhone launch?
Yes, I do. Especially since Steve Jobs rejected the idea of third party apps when he was asked about it after the iPhone launch.
You still haven’t answered my question though. What does Flash have to do with the App Store?
Because even if the App Store was an afterthought it is still a control mechanism for software on the platform.
Flash allows apps not controlled by Apple to run on their devices.
This is reinforced by Steve Jobs not wanting 3rd party developers of any sort at launch.
If Flash is allowed then a large portion of developers will simply create Flash apps, similar to most of current native apps, with alternate distribution mechanisms and Steve would not get his 30% fee which he gets from App Store.
kapish/comprende/clear/ …
“…Steve would not get his 30% fee which he gets from App Store.”
Why would Apple care about that? It’s not like Apple forces people to charge for their apps. You can already get free apps and games in the App Store.
So if Apple already allows people to sell free apps and games in the App Store, why would they care if people played free Flash games and Flash video on the web?
If this were just about money, Apple would have restricted access to YouTube also, since people get video on YouTube free. If Apple was banning Flash because of money, then they would restrict YouTube access so that people would pay for video on iTunes instead.
So explain that to me.
@Paul, free apps ars still good for Apple because you still have to go to the app store to get them. You’ve never heard of a department store giving away a cheap product just to get people walking through the store? Do you think Apple would be happy with a situation where people looking for games for the iPhone first went to a popular website hosting Flash games (run by a third-party, possibly aimed squarely at the iPhone market) instead of the app store? Also, may iPhone games are unique to the iPhone which also adds value to the product. Flash games would undermine this too.
Yes, Apple could have restricted YouTube viewing but of course they have to walk the fine line between controlling the device and making it attractive to customers. In that case, they chose to allow YouTube (which I think was a good business decision).
it’s mostly about control instead of money. apple doesn’t want a dilution of their service/products and they feel like the current state of flash is inferior (even if flash was up to capabilities by the rest of the world/other companies not named apple, apple under steve jobs and the other heads there will still say flash is inferior and adobe is lazy. it is just the way of apple. people need to get over it. the choice adobe is trying to get apple to accept and allow the choice to users is not acceptable to apple. apple also controls the message of it’s users and since apple sells more to the general populous now, instead of just techies, they don’t question the apple message of control).
you example of youtube is the same with how they haven’t banned google maps/streetview and other google apps. people who say the web uses a lot of flash interface are correct, and that since html5 isn’t a web standard yet, that it’s not going to get rid of flash (just because of this youtube experiment with html5 and the ipad and other products that are moving to html5). as a user i would appreciate if some sort of standard can be maitained so that no matter what browser i use i can view the websites i want and play games, watch videos, etc… without having errors happening all over the place, and crashes, and empty white boxes with x’s asking me to download plug-in’s etc.
@yeah
Thanks, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying. It has nothing to do with money, but the Apple Haters want everyone to believe that because it makes Apple look like greedy bastards.
Steve Jobs was caught saying in private that Flash is buggy and slow, which is why he didn’t want it on the iPhone or iPad. Why the heck would he lie during a private meeting with his employees? This is the same meeting where he called Adobe lazy and insulted Google.
So according to the Apple Haters, we’re supposed to believe that Apple doesn’t like Flash, because it would compete with the App Store, even though they made the decision before the App Store even existed and we’re supposed to believe that they don’t want people watching free Flash video and playing free Flash games, even though there are already free apps, games and video on the iPhone.
And we’re supposed to believe this greed motive, despite the fact that Steve Jobs has admitted in private that Flash is buggy and slow.
The Apple Haters don’t have one shred of proof to back this up, but we’re supposed to believe their lies, just because.
Uh, no. Apple doesn’t like Flash because it is shit. That is all.
lol. i can’t believe my comment. as usual full of spelling errors and bad grammar but thanks for reading it. i’m not really an apple hater (although i don’t like the company but am very fond of the different sections of the company and aspire to work there either as a designer or marketer or work for google’s maps devision) so when i make my comments about the company it doesn’t really come from a place of emotion. i might not like what they do yeah because i’m a believer of a different view, but i understand why apple is what they are and over the years i’ve been studying apple (had to do a couple reports about the company last semester for my graphics design class. apple is featured in a lot of design material. it’s almost as insuffrable as it is hilarious). they are a company. they run like a company. they care about their bottom lines, reaching their achievements and tasks they set out via their timelines and they are me first. another commenter in one of these other apple threads (i think the most reacent one about them removing a usb downloading function for some company that robin wauters posted today) apple is not all about the user. apple says it’s all about the user but what matters above all to apple is control. that it’s the most important thing that probably overrules everything else for that company. if you’re an ocd type of person, a creator of any type (coder for example) then you understand. you might not want to or agree with them but it doesn’t take a genuis or a lot of brain exertion to figure this simple point out. from that their whole ecosystem, history, their viewpoints, their products, their everything rolls out. i’ve gone through my flash sucks phrase and i just realised that i was being stupid, willfully stupid maybe, but even when i figured out that some people i know don’t even care to try and figure out why flash is so problematic, i didn’t give in to the stupidity that seems to rule us general populus people. i am not a techie. i am obviously the normal type person (as many commenters seem to mention in the maxipad is for mom’s posts) you would think buys an apple product because i have watched more than 1000 of their commercials and i buy their message. sorry. my only saving grace is that i like to think about things. people who don’t admit that apple is a great company are simply lying to themselves. apple innovated but to a certain extent. they hold back a lot (and we all know holding back is not sexy) as a company and that may be a byproduct for their need to control. the creativity people talk about in realtion to that company is also limited because it’s within their spectrum. if apple ever became a company like google for instance which likes to disrupt because they see that as a way of moving forward, then maybe apple would be coming at people’s perceptions with a wicked golden glove left hook…but once again that’s not the case. it doesn’t pay to be a hater in any means because it just means you’re blinded. apple is not ruling the world if you think about it but the are controlling a message they want to infiltrate into the masses and that is that it’s good if a company holds all the controls to your devices/platforms/gadgets/tools, and that is something people just inherintley baulk at. people hate control unless they know it’s good for them, which is specifically why apple drums this message and why they are one of the companies to benefit from the message of control. what’s really surprising is that in a country like america, who hate large entities controlling them (the unthinkers mostly, but i think there’s a lot of smart people who also don’t like government or corporate control and would perfer being their own drivers) apple is a pretty popular country.
meant apple is a popular company.
there’s a reason people shouldn’t function on no sleep and their vice of ganja, drugs, coffee, sugar, or gatorade.
and i don’t agree with you about the whole it’s not about money point (people keep bringing up the money slant to this for a reason…mostly devs see). it’s always about money. apple is a company. bottom lines always involve money instead of altruistic motives, and the only reason i said it’s not about money, when i probably should have said it’s not just about money, is that control for them trumps money, but money is integral to their message as well. they wouldn’t have all that control if they didn’t have huge money, huge money interests backing them. apple is a company. it doesn’t pay to become emotional about it or any other company really. it’s nice for consumers to be invested in their products, but it’s probably better to just think smart.
Yes, Apple initially never had intentions on allowing third party application development. They began with trying to push mobile applications but we saw how that worked out.
It is easy to see how Flash undermines the entire app store. Apple wants to be the moral gate keeper for every program that runs on the device and wants to collect a toll for every program sold. It does not want any other way for a program to be run on the device. Clearly, having Flash and/or AIR equivelent on the device could completely destroy that ecosystem. There are millions of Flash programmers who could write their apps for the iPad/iPhone/iTouch and sell them however they wanted and wherever they wanted, and not have to pay Apple. Whether or not the App Store was thought about before or after Apple banned Flash does not matter. Apple still wanted 100% control and could clearly see the threat Flash posed.
That’s right~
If HTML5 can be considered a flash competitor, and Apple is pushing HTML5 … It would also be a competitor. So the Flash vs App Store argument makes no sense to me.
Adobe tried to charge for mobile Flash pre-April 2008 and this is part of what turned the tide against them.
Also does this figure about 75% of video on the web also include YouTube? Because it should be clear that iPhone OS has the ability to interpret embedded YouTube videos.
Please. It is much easier to create a native app experience on Flash, Flex and ActionScript than it is using the iPhone SDK and Objective-C. That’s already an advantage to the developer. Then you’ve got the tiny issue of Apple keeping 30% of the fruit of your hard labor.
HTML5 can’t do half the things Flash does. You do realize there’s a lot more to Flash than just web video, right? Even talking only about games you can clearly see how Apple sees Flash as a threat. You can have all kinds of sweet games made in Flash, and that’s precious revenue that Apple doesn’t get to tack their 30% tax on.
Then you go into Flex applications, which provide a native app experience in the browser, and you have a pretty good idea of why Flash will never, ever be supported on the iPhone or iPad.
um no, you’re under the mistaken assumption like 99.9% of the so called techies on the internet that flash=video=html5. This is completely wrong. Flash is a DEVELOPMENT environment, much like an operating system. That’s why you have things like flash desktops. If apple allowed other operating systems on their iphones then these operating systems could completely bypass it’s revenue stream. This is the reason why they also refuse to let emulators onto the app store as well.
I think a smart move for Adobe would be to continue to leverage its community of designers and developers. Further enable them to produce AJAX/HTML 5/iPhone/.swf/whatever by augmenting the CS authoring tools to export to those formats. Perhaps the days of the Flash Player may be numbered, but if competing technologies have similar capabilities to the Flash Player, then why not export to those as well?
I totally agree.
Perfect solution.
This is an interesting solution. From a developer’s perspective, the main draw to Flash is not really their player, but the versatility of the platform and their authoring tools , Flash and FlexBuilder, which are lightyears ahead of anything HTML5 has to offer. I think that’s what they’re going to do with the Flash to iPhone packager.
yep, wouldn’t surprise me if Adobe developed a canvas/js/svg export for flash. after all, advertisers aren’t simply going back to animated gifs if flash falls out of favor.
“but HTML5 is advancing faster and as a native Web standard it has many other advantages which may help it win over time.”
Erick, have your kept up-to-date on the HTML 5 development process and more to the point what exactly it will allow. It’s several years behind, is lead by Apple and Google engineers and does not guarantee unified video across all platforms or media.
So Kevin Lynch is that wrong in his assertion that it could actually be a step backwards to think that HTML5 will in the near term come anyway close to replace Flash as a media player in browsers.
I’m flash developer but I think video should just be video rendered natively in the browser, so without any crashes prone flash layer.. let flash be there for the apps and games etc.
And adobe should really make a better flash plugin for the mac, compared to a the windows plugin it feels like it was written in 1999
the thing about HTML5 is the it’s open some if there is a bug or missing feature many people can contribute and no one needs to wait for “lazy Adobe” to fix anything.
there are many things i don’t like about the iPad but no flash support is not one of them.
The underlying codecs will still come form somewhere, if it is up to Apple and Google, who want proprietary H.264 as opposed to Mozilla who wants to standardize on Theodora.
So, it’s now like that if there is a bug anyone can open and fix it.
Moreover, Steve would still have to provide low level access to these codecs, which I doubt he would.
So, HTML5 won’t fix anything.
No reason browsers couldn’t include multiple codecs like Flash does. “Flash video” is not a codec. Flash contains half a dozen codecs.
The problem is that Firefox won’t support h264 and IE probably won’t support Theora. And yes, there are reasons why this is so.
and furthermore, even IE8 doesn’t include video tag support. HTML5 video serving up h.264 is fantastic… if the UA is Safari or Chrome!
@jon,
I don’t know about your assertion that “many people can contribute and no one needs to wait for lazy Adobe to fix anything” – the HTML spec isn’t going to get instantly revised like a Wikipedia entry. It is a spec which has, I believe, a fairly protracted approval process and this is one of the problems. Yes, browser development firms can correct bugs, but its up to each such entity to do this. Bottom line, HTML5, especially broad, complete and standardized HTML5 support, is a long way off.
its innovate or die for flash, they still have a bright future but it’ll be precarious path, one slip and they’ll gone for good.
My shockwave flash plug in is crashing everyday on Google chrome and Microsoft internet explorer 7-8
how come i ever get crashed on my explorer 7 or chrome or firefox.
I really don’t understand what kind of errors people get by using flash. I have ever recieved any errors by using flash. Maybe their isn’t anything wrong with flash its with our own system or some other software that conflicts with it? Lets have a poll and see how many people have problems with flash.
I average at least 2 crashes a day due to Flash (normal Youtube videos), particularly when trying to watch an HD video. No matter the video though my CPU always spikes to 80-100% which is absurd. And no, it’s not my system, it’s flash.
It’s your system. Not Flash
I’m running flash for years on different Windows pcs and never experienced problems or any CPU peaks at all.
Same here. I’m using a 2 year old Macbook Pro and Flash runs great. Never crashes and the CPU usage is tolerable. After all it has to render video which is intensive even for the Quicktime player running outside the browser. People don’t seem to understand that anything other than a static webpage needs processing power. 95% of the flash haters are exaggerating severely because their right on Jobs’ jock.
The numbers that were told at WWDC is that according to statistics Flash is responsible for over 60% of crashes on Mac OS X.
Notice that this is ALL crashes on Macs but not Safari crashes.
HTML5 video won’t compete with Flash video until it’s in IE (which they won’t happen) or Firefox supports H.264 (which they won’t happen).
No video website that wants to make money is going to use Ogg/Vorbis or ignore IE.
Luckily Flash actually runs fine on Windows. And Flash also supports H.264.
So adding video tag support in IE is a minor javascript fix that loads up Flash for IE dinosaurs. Same is done for WebSockets and the other HTML5 tags are also easily added using a quick script. It’s quick and easy and it is the standard for a while in the web world to fix the problems of IE. Open up a random website and look at the source and you will probably see endless amounts of IE fixes.
People have all gotten sick of companies like Microsoft and Adobe literally slowing down the technological evolution of the human race. When I imagine where the Web could be if it weren’t for MS…..
Adobe slowing down the technological evolution of the human race? Are you kidding me? Where was YouTube, MySpace, Google Street View, etc. before Flash? Not to mention any website with a decent file uploader. Adobe/Macromedia has been pushing the web harder than any other company. Then there’s augmented reality, making phone calls from your browser (Ribbit), etc.
So as Firefox won’t support h264, are you going to use Flash for that too? Or encode all your videos two or three times in different codecs to suit Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE. What’s the point of HTML5 video then when you could just us Flash, encode in h264, and avoid all that crap?
JonGretar, what sort of crack are you on? Adobe slowing down technological evolution???
Have you heard of a little program called Photoshop?
Used a PDF once or twice?
I have no idea why Apple hates Flash so much. I’m a developer and html “standards” are the biggest joke in the world. Meanwhile, the few projects I’ve developed in Flash have worked without issue and look the same on absolutely every machine.
I don’t know what kind of Flash things people are viewing that is causing crashes. Is it weird games? Pr0n?
It’s great that Adobe is finally under pressure … Flash Player on Mac is indeed constantly either slowing down the browser or crashing it.
But even worse … have a look at the Creative Suite. Literally every app is full of obvious bugs (save for web in Photoshop is *great* fun).
The introduction of Flash to the user interfaces of Photoshop, etc. might have done development easier at Adobe but the user experience is awful. Neither does it feel like a native interface (e.g. number inputs) nor is it consistent across the different apps.
The fact that there is a blog just about that http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ at least makes me not the only one facing these issues during my everyday work …
The drama keeps going – http://twitpic.com/1114pb
With the Flash vs HTML5 issues aside, I think the price Adobe puts on its Creative Suite is setting us against them. It’s terrible…why won’t they at least do a 3yr deal for startup developers trying to use it do more with less? No! They have to gouge everyone. Just look at the enormous profits Adobe makes. I won’t soon forget.
Have to agree, their prices have been horribly high for far too long. They need competition to thrive, and haven’t had any for too long.
I’m not an Apple fan either for similar reasons, they both need to serve their communities better. Being petulant and pissy towards each other isn’t helping anyone.
Jobs, put Flash on the ‘i’s, Lynch, take a McDonald’s approach to all your products, you charge way too much. Then you will both profit and have happier customers.
Their price is reasonable. They charge $2000 for a product (CS3 Master Collection) and their users turn around and turn it into $2 million. These sames users really don’t have any reason to upgrade to CS4, 5 or 6. So that $2000 invested made them millions (over several years) and Adobe only saw $2000 (over the same time span).
However, that said, not everyone makes millions off of using Adobe products. Students, freelancers and small businesses, for example. So yeah, it seems expensive to them. How can you learn the tool if you can’t afford to buy it legally?
Students can get CS4 with a large discount, saying that it’s still not exactly cheap.
Users don’t have a reason to upgrade to CS5 or 6 because they don’t exist (yet).
Quark recommends the Russian or Chinese discount Adobe package for you and your friends.
Today kids we learn the word, “bias”.
/b’aɪəs/
a particular tendency or inclination, esp. one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question; prejudice
The only thing I worried about when adobe bought macromedia was continued innovation and development. If Adobe rest on the success of flash and don’t keep innovating, something will inevitably take over. The best defense Adobe can mount for flash is to keep up innovation with the product…
“Adobe supports HTML5, but its incompatibilities across browsers spells doom for the Web.”
I think he’s missing the point.
HTML5 is about a lot more than just web-video for one, and second the push for HTML5 is also part of a broader effort to force some standardization across browsers.
Back in the early days of the web, developers and content providers had to bend over backwards and find solutions like Flash to take care of the differences in web browsers.
As the internet has grown and become much larger that has become increasingly difficult to do and it’s a model that doesn’t scale as more and more new technologies and uses for the web appear on the radar.
Furthermore, unlike the early days of the web… modern browsers have all (except IE) evolved around open standards in support of IE. With some of the efforts Google, Apple, and others are making towards HTML5 and a Flash-free world I think you’ll see fewer browser specific issues.
Google’s recent announcement that they are no longer supporting IE6 should be evidence of the new direction the web is taking.
This is more than a fight over technology formats, this is the last days of a raging battle that’s been going on for years to finally get rid of all the old arcaeic browsers the past and finally modernize the web.
The need for Adobe’s product and the reason for their market share is dated and only exists because of the mistakes and lack of standards from the start of web.
EVERYONE who is creating new content for the web these days is trying to correct those “sins of the past” through robust open standards like HTML5, WebKit, and GWT and as a result, the need for Adobe’s product is dwindling very fast.
HTML5 is inevitable. If Flash is going to stick around, Adobe needs to carve out a new reason for it to stay. The web is evolving and we don’t need or want to install a long menu of plug-ins to use it.
Well said Brandon
Flash is like a bridge over a disappearing river.
Brandon, I agree with you 100%. However, here and now, we don’t have any mature authoring tool other than Flash for designers and animators to use (maybe someone could point me to a HTML5 animation tool?)
Many of our corporate clients are still stuck in IE6, and it will be years before we can see the support for HTML5. So stop using Flash is out of the question.
After Adobe bought Macromedia, Flash lost its focus and decided that it is more of a programming tool than an animation authoring tool. The average designers now just don’t get it.
It didn’t lose focus — it changed to offer more power and ensure it’s survival. There is nothing to fully replace it and as it will keep changing there never will be.
Well, Google Chrome Frame could solve this – if IE need to be retrofitted by flash, than retrofit it with HTML5…
Open source Flash and make it a companion to Web Kit before it’s too late!
Steve jobs is a meanie calling Adobe lazy lol
Can’t they just release it for jailbroken iphone?
It’s been a long time and i’m sure the product is ready, the jailbreak community is used to experimental products that don’t “just work”, give me flash in browser so i can watch videos from websites other than Youtube and finally have the whole web in my pocket and I won’t really care if it crashes once a day…
Please ADOBE contact SAURIK @ CYDIA or the guys from ROCK….
Can’t they just release it for jailbroken iphone?
It’s been a long time and i’m sure the product is ready, the jailbreak community is used to experimental products that don’t “just work”, give me flash in browser so i can watch videos from websites other than Youtube and finally have the whole web in my pocket and I won’t really care if it crashes once a day…
Please ADOBE contact SAURIK @ CYDIA or the guys from ROCK….
Flash for smartphones runs on Blackberry? Huh?
It’s not release yet. But will be available within the next few months. RIM has announced this already.
Because I develop with Flash, run the debug Flash player. It is simply amazing how many adverts and/or sites have fatal code errors. (The debug version will give you a window with the listing dump.) Perhaps Flash should handle these more elegantly when someone writes code that crashes. Maybe HTML 5 will handle fatal bugs better. My sense is that Flash is the worst offender right now because it is the RIA that is used most for complex code. Once the shift for writing complex RIA apps or adverts shifts to HTML 5 happens, people will be complaining about HTML 5. I’m not following HTML 5 much right now. Does it have something that will keep poorly written code from affecting the browser??
BTW: Techcrunch for soooo long had Flash errors generated every page at their site. Not sure if it was an ad, or poorly written site code. FInally has been fixed. Thanks to whomever did this. (Given the regularity of the error, methinks it was a TC error.)
That makes perfect sense!!! I dont understand how the readers of TC (I assume are mostly developers) blame just the flash player for the crashes and dont consider the fact that it is always the badly written code that causes the crash. All these so called developers, start using debug version of flash player and then you will understand whats actually going on!!!
well they don’t even need to do that. they basically have to think. we had an old pc we bought but basically retooled it every couple of years to extend it’s lifeline, and anyways we used windows and ie whatever version was out in the year. we’ve used windows and ie for basically everything, and depending on the websites we visited which used flash, we would get an inordinant amount of crashing. i finally decided to look at what the problem was and look at how some of these websites were being coded and i just saw how really lazy people who mabye just don’t care, were causing me all kinds of problems with my computer and web browsing capabilites. i actually thought i was crazy, but when i was at school and using pc’s and other browsers i wouldn’t have this whole flash crash problem. with every update of ie, the flash integration has gotten better but still there are websites that i go to even now with flash plug-ins that will crash my browser/computer. it’s unfortunate but it’s a reality and before when i just wanted to believe it was all a flash problem and blame adobe, i did. now i realize that i can’t be that stupid and give in to blind anger. it really bothers me that i can’t say fuck flash. i don’t actively seek it out, and i don’t block it or try to not go to websites using flash, but as soon as i see the code and it’s buggy i try to leave the website asap and try to cancel out whatever command i enabled. in the eyes of the general public, flash will never get a fair shake and that’s probaby because people are easily annoyed by ad’s and buggy videos that don’t play, or aspects of games you can’t use because you don’t have flash, and because adobe doesn’t do a good enough job explaining just basic things about flash and web browsing with the general people.
Willing to bet you’re using the debugger flash player. That one generates lots of errors. Dump it and re-install the non-dev version and I bet your errors go away.
Well not really an option unless you want to write Flex code and try to debug without any error messages
People that write more pure code than me first time thru can do this, but I’m more productive with a debugger, and they are probably enthralled with GO anyways. That failed bit of humor aside, you can see the error listings, and usually figure out what’s up. Blaming the Flash debug version is again simple Adobe bashing. Adobe is not perfect, but there is a HELL of a lot of bad code out there. Wait till all these “programmers” move away from Flash and to HTML 5 + actionscript + JQuery + ??. Maybe you can’t write fatal errors with these tools so we’ll have no more issues — a crash-free web. If so, I’m there in a heart beat. Til then, Flex Builder Pro is a pretty good environment to write complex RIA code.
FWIW, crashing adverts make perfect sense. My GF works in marketing/advertising, and she gets handed flash from an outside advertising agency and tries to make it work. She’s FAR from a computer nerd, and basically just tries to get ANYTHING to display so all hell doesn’t break loose. There’s no telling what ends up in that final code…
i also experience my fair share of flash crashes. historically, open standards have prevailed on the internet and i’m confident that a occam’s razor will prevail. html5 is not a replacement for flash, but it is definitely a replacement for flash video.
I despise Flash. If you use multiple browsers, Flash will not work on all of them. For example, when I install Flash in I.E. it ceases working in Firefox or Chrome, when I install it in Chrome, then it no longer works in I.E. Adobe claims it’s a problem in my Windows setup, MS claims it’s a problem in Flash, etc. Flash is the only thing that periodically hard-locks my PC so that I have to press the reset button. Again, Adobe blames my videocard, but I can play DirectX games for hours on end and those are far more demanding than Flash. As a user vs. a hard-core tekkie I hope Flash goes the way of the dodo.
+1!
get a new computer. something wrong with yours. if flash was as bad as you’re saying companies wouldn’t be pouring millions into developing RIA’s on the platform. Think about it. Your computer is broken, fix it.
You have a trojan on your computer that hijacks the Flash and other Internet traffic.
My two cents on that:
“Due to performance problems using Adobe Flash within Firefox on many websites, especially those with multiple plug-ins on them, we have disabled plugins for Firefox for Maemo 1.0. ” – Firefox for Nokia N900 Release Notes.
http://www.clipfish.de – most popular video site in germany – has a mobile version for iPhone – without any need for flash.
“To play the game use keys “k”, “j” and space bar” – touch devices like the iPhone or iPad don’t have concept of mouse-over or key press events.
How far away are we from seeing HTML 5 on the www?
Somewhere between 2 and 12 years.
Around 2 for W3C Candidate Recommendation, and up to 12 or maybe more for full W3C Recommendation.
Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera all have some of HTML5 implemented in their latest shipping versions. HTML5 is not a single feature, but rather a set of features. Video is one of those features. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox all ship with HTML5 video and Opera’s next version will. Microsoft has said they’re interested in HTML5 video.
You are seeing it now. YouTube and Vimeo both offer HTML5 versions of their site. And many *new* sites are using HTML5 as default.
It’s actually quite simple to add basic HTML5 tag support to IE. JS is is used to dynamically switch to a Flash player for the IE platform. As Flash runs fine on Windows this is not a problem.
Web developers have a long history if fixing the bugs in IE using all sorts of fixes. Every site does it. And yeas I’m calling Microsoft’s inability to follow any knows standards “a bug”. Because that’s what the would call it if it were other peoples software and their standards.
The YouTube site doesn’t work with the browsers used by 90% of people surfing the net! Is that really a viable alternative?