Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? | Hacker News Reader

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

daringfireball.net

130 pointsspicyj68 comments

In the midst of the iPad Flash controversy I think people are overlooking that Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007. They missed their promise to deliver a beta for the Android and WebOS platforms in 2009. Android support is now projected for mid-2010. Since 2007 Apple has released 3 major versions of their iPhone OS, Google has announced, developed, and released a SmartPhone OS with 2 major revisions. Apple developed, announced, and will release the iPad before Adobe ships a modern mobile Flash for a large variety of devices. Linux & OSX support for Flash on the desktop is still subpar. If you think Flash is good or bad there are serious questions here about Adobe's ability to simply support this platform that is so widely relied on by developers.

Precisely. Not to mention the wonderful little easter egg that is flash-cookies which the user has no control over or visibility into. Adobe has let most of it's constituencies down.

I didn't know about flash cookies. That's a mini scandal.

Here's Adobe's terrible UI for viewing and deleting your Flash cookies: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...

That's actually bookmarked as the first item in my Firefox toolbar. Use it regularly, though also using the Better Privacy FF add-on. .

At least there's some hope:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht...

"Flash Player 10.1 abides by the host browser's "private browsing" mode, where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content. Private local shared objects behave like their public variants as long as Flash Player is in memory and local shared objects created during private browsing are removed when returning to public browsing mode. Existing shared objects are preserved but inaccessible until private browsing is turned off. Libraries in the Flash Player cache, like the Adobe Flex® framework, are unaffected by private mode. Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. No developer action required."

I opted to use Adobe Air for a new project a year (or two maybe) ago. At the time Adobe's was making lots of waves at the speed of their JIT compiler and support for platforms like Linux had improved (at least slightly). Now I'm thinking Adobe just hasn't delivered on any of the promise it showed back then. I think they have themselves to blame, and there certainly seemed like there was a time when Apple really wanted flash on the iPhone and they just didn't deliver.

- - Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007.

Flash Player 9.4 is shipping on the Nokia N900, and works pretty nicely in the standard browser. Wouldn't that count as a major upgrade? (It's still one version behind the desktop counterpart, but at least it supports all the features of Flash 9 instead of a Lite subset.)

That "Player 9.4" is a bit of an odd bird. Nokia was insistent, a few years ago, on showing the world's real webpages on a pocket device -- they were the first to want to do desktop-style browsers and plugins, rather than Flash applications or native UIs on mobile. I didn't believe it could be done, but I did use an N700 when it became available.

From what I understand, Nokia adapted an older Adobe Linux codebase to the smaller device, and implemented it as a plugin to their browser. Nokia is currently a major partner in the Open Screen Project, and is poised to take advantage of the mobile optimizations in the upcoming Player 10.1 release.

So, oddly, I'd tend to agree with the earlier poster, than we haven't seen fruits of Mobile Flash work recently. But now in Jan10, it's almost showtime.... ;-)

Adobe have had years and years to produce a well performing Flash for Mac OS X. They have done absolutely nothing besides pulling a straw mans argument about lack of hardware support.

With this history in mind, why do people think that Apple would trust Adobe all of a sudden would produce a well performing implementation for the iPad/iPhone?

Steve Jobs claims you will get "the entire internet" on the iPad, even though Flash, Silverlight, and other technologies are not present.

Who's being dishonest about this? Is Adobe really pulling a strawman? I support Adobe's claim of Apple's passive interference in OSX since it obviously exists in the iPhone OS.

True on the schedules. In 2008 Flash's mobile and desktop teams merged, to create a common runtime codebase across device form-factors. The Open Screen Project has a dramatically wide range of collaborators... one of the most massive examples of cross-company scheduling I've ever seen.

Mobile World Congress is in Barcelona in February. That should be the coming-out party for the entire next generation, and shipments will ramp up through 2010.

Adobe's development strategy in general seems to be to release v1.0 of something...then pile crap on top of it for as long as possible hoping that Moore's law helps them out.

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...

I recommend you dig just a little deeper before slamming Adobe. On one hand you praise Android et al for releasing so many major revisions, yet slam them for not keeping up on each of those platforms and revisions (i.e. the moving target paradox).

Here's something that came to mind reading this: When the iPhone was announced (and once again when the SDK was announced) there was a fair amount of teeth gnashing and whining about Java not being supported.

Haven't heard one peep about Java on iPad this time around. Will Flash suffer the same fate?

The Java-on-the-iPhone critics were less numerous from the start (or at least were not as vocal). But you're right, though; I think it's easier now to wonder if Java would offer anything compelling to the iPhone platform anyway (other than offering another way to run your own code, which is a different discussion entirely).

As to your second question: Java is a fundamentally important language in its own right (the enterprise angle); its success was never really tied to the availability of client-side runtimes. Flash doesn't quite have that same luxury.

I'm kind of second-guessing my thought as well. In the early days (well, the first year, really) of the iPhone Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based. No SDK needed.

The concern over Java at that point was if it was going to be allowed on the phone at all. JME/J2ME was what the mobile industry was trending toward. The success of Cocoa Touch and the App Store has pretty much made J2ME a footnote (except for the few carriers still hanging on).

> The success of Cocoa Touch and the App Store has pretty much made J2ME a footnote

So now all cellphone apps are written in Cocoa Touch?

Never said that.

The ease and user experience of Cocoa Touch and Android make J2ME apps look so slow and ugly that I don't honestly believe any consumer will put up with those kind of devices for much longer.

About a year ago I sat in a meeting with a carrier that proclaimed "We're not worried about iPhone" but in the same breath asked "so, how can we get an App Store running for our handsets?"

Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based.

Is there an actual quote to back this up? I was paying close attention back in the "shit sandwich" days and I don't recall this "steadfast" insistence being actually stated by anyone from Apple. What I do remember was just a big disappointment at the time and Apple's usual silence on future plans. And the web SDK they did offer did actually end up getting used widely, as Gruber mentions in this article.

I'm not trying to argue, I just see this idea that Apple never planned a native SDK is repeated so often and yet it doesn't fly with what I remember.

I totally understand. In the flurry of it all we've all forgotten what you remembered: Apple never said anything to the point of "No SDK. Ever."

Aside from Jobs' WWDC 2007 address there were rumors and signals that "web was all you're gonna get"[1][2], but obviously they planned an SDK that eventually was announced 9 months after the reveal. Or developer pressure convinced the staff to polish the internal tools and APIs for public use? I'm kind of sad that with the new secretive Apple, we'll never know the full story behind the scenes for a long long time to come.

[1] http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-covera...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-...

Ultimately, what made Java on the iPhone irrelevant was the fact that the App Store was dominated by hobbyists and independent programmers. Java is not a hobbyist's language; it is the language that the non-technical corporate executives tell you to use. Objective-C and Cocoa were a fun enough environment that individuals were willing to learn how to use them in order to cash in on the iPhone App gold rush. The iPad will probably get more attention from corporate software developers, but it will also be getting a lot more attention from the hobbyists who are drooling over the possibilities of the big multitouch screen, and they are the ones who will be creating the truly innovative apps.

(Yes, there are now sound technical reasons to use Java in enterprise environments, but that's only because Sun's marketing got it into the corporations in the first place. Java was originally intended for embedded systems, and later for web browsers. It's completely failed on both platforms.)

Except you don't run Java code, you run JVM byte code, and there are an increasing number of entertaining ways to do that without writing any Java.

The prospect of writing iStuff apps using Scala, Clojure (and one day I hope [J]Ruby) should be awfully appealing to innovative hobbyists, perhaps more so than using ObjC

On that note, is it possible to do that on Android? I know it's Java-based with their own low-level JVM or something like that.

Yes, it is, but it is currently not used for production.

Dalvik does not care about language, it converts java class files to dex file. However, Scala/Clojure/etc have runtimes with quite significant initialization time, that gets lost on desktop, but not on mobile devices. Scala is getting there with minimal runtime, but Clojure still initializes too much and the startup time of Clojure application on Android is atrocious.

A screenshot showing aviary working because they made a quicktime video alternate? Aviary's whole platform is a stunning example of how awesome Flash really can be, it's a suite of cutting edge design tools done in Flash and they haven't ported those to the iPhone - check them out if you want, their apps are just amazing: http://www.aviary.com

The 'games' they mention are not what TFB is showing either. Addicting Games (owned by MTV) is a casual game site with somewhere around a million daily visitors and 1000s of games you can just click to play, not apps you need to find, maybe buy, download and install.

Even if that process is streamlined it doesn't scale to the extent Flash game sites do where at any time your investment in any game is just a click and countless other games are also just a click away.

But the vast majority of flash games are useless on the iPhone and iPad, because they expect input mechanisms that those devices don't have. Though there's probably less variety, native games clearly provide a better experience because they are designed for the hardware.

Yes! It's extraordinary to me how much people forget this. Flash would be nice on the iPhone OS devices for movies, but a huge percentage of the games would be unplayable. No wonder Apple isn't interested.

In many cases you're right, Flash UI conventions are not going to generically hold true across the board for iPhones. A lot more would work than the current situation, where none do.

The Hulu developers didn't pick Flash because it was "easy." They picked it because it allowed them to retain a high degree of control over their streaming video content -- control they would lose if they exposed an h.264 stream to an iPhone or iPad client.

I think it could be five years or more before anyone watches Hulu or Netflix on any of these devices.

No, I think the hulu developers picked flash because that's where the users are. They could have chosen java, or silverlight, but they chose flash for the same reason most sites choose flash. I'm sure if Hulu wanted to, they could develop a native app, just like the YouTube native app, for the iPhone, but my guess is that it wasn't part of their strategy initially.

If netflix wants the iPad users, they would develop their own native app and ship it just like the other dozens of apps out there. In fact, it would give Hulu & Netflix greater control over their users with a native app. Hulu has already developed a desktop app, why wouldn't they develop a native app for the iPhone?

Remember back in the IE4 & IE5 days? Lots of companies developed native ActiveX components that could be embedded into webpages because most users used IE4. I'm actually quite happy that Apple is forcing web companies out there to rethink open platforms. There's quite a few demos that show how powerful javascript & canvas can be already. It would be nice if we could replace the majority of flash apps with javascript, canvas, and webgl.

I don't think it's fair to say that the Hulu developers "picked" flash. The number of technologies suitable for displaying video on the web in a reasonable way (pre-html5) is extremely limited, flash is pretty much the only game in town. Vimeo, youtube, break, etc, they all use flash. Now HTML5 is at least a reasonable alternative for a small fraction of web users but still Flash is the only reasonable option for video on the web today.

If Hulu or Netflix (which uses Silverlight) were to make a native application for iPad would Apple approve it? I don't know. Neither Hulu or Netflix could make an application without approval of both Apple and their content providers.

It may also be worth nothing that those not located in America can't simply use a proxy to access Hulu because Flash doesn't obey system proxy settings -- a VPN is required. If strong region-restriction is a priority of Hulu's then this could be a disincentive towards them providing a non-Flash option.

This is a really good point actually. Hulu actually uses the encrypted variant of RTMP to deliver content, and decodes the stream in their flash player. If they were to deliver just raw h.264 through html5, they wouldn't be able to do this anymore.

Vevo (the music video people on youtube) are actually doing the same thing. You can't watch the videos without using the special flash player.

RTMPE is a joke:

http://lkcl.net/rtmp/RTMPE.txt

"Overall, then, the Adobe RTMPE algorithm tries to provide end-to-end secrecy in exactly the same way that SSL provides end-to-end secrecy, but the algorithm is subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, provides no security, relies on publicly obtainable information and the algorithm itself to obfuscate the content, and uses no authentication of any kind"

The Adobe response to this shoddy engineering being revealed? DMCA takedown requests to sourceforge:

http://ossguy.com/?p=398

Our company's bread and butter are Flash-based portfolio sites (and a good amount of bread, I might add).

But I don't want Flash on the iPhone OS. I remember looking at one of our sites on my old Dell Axim—it sucked.

I'm already working on new, non-Flash offerings and they're going to sell well (I think). I can do almost everything my clients want now w/o Flash—once HTML 5 is fully supported, everything.

Like Gruber said, I don't care about Adobe, I care about me and my clients.

There's always the status quo - that the majority of content producers will simply continue to make content using Flash that the iPhone and iPad can't access, and users mostly live with it with the occasional grumble, while the bigger providers will largely create dedicated applications to work-around the issue (and that isn't going to kill Flash).

Let's get some perspective here. The iPhone currently represents around 0.45% of all web browsing (citation: http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/net_applicatio...). The iPhone's dent in Flash's market share represents at most a drop from 99% to 98%. For the iPhone and iPad to get the marketshare of Opera, this usage would need to triple. Would you radically redesign how your site works for Opera users? Developers do follow what their users have, but little has changed and users still have Flash.

To make matters worse, there's no drop-in replacement. For the most common use-case of audio and video, we're in standards hell -- Firefox and Internet Explorer make up over 80% of web browsers on the Internet between them, and Mozilla aren't going to support the H.264 video tag and Microsoft are unlikely to support it in IE either. And in many other cases, websites are using Flash to do things they simply can't do in HTML (or even HTML5), whether DRM, streaming video, or something vastly more complicated.

What I think every time I see the blue boxes screenshots:

http://gr.ayre.st/s/images/go_flash.png

That's what I think of every time I see a page that has flash on it. It makes me wish I knew of an easy way to install a fake flash plugin into Chrome that intentionally crashes immediately.

There's the FlashBlock extension, it's a bit primitive yet but still seemingly useful:

http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flash...

Every time i see a page with flash on it i think,

"Sure glad i installed clickToFlash."

[ —not affiliated with CTF... but not a fan of hyperkinetic ads and auto-start videos.]

I have never, never, EVER had flash crash. Nor has anyone else I know. But then, they all use PCs..

It's always easy to spot people who make a living programming solely in Flash. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon -- people will suddenly, and vocally, speak up in support of Flash with outlandish claims.

I'm not sure who's making the outlandish claims here.

I haven't programmed Flash in my life, but I can't say I've had Flash crash on me more often than, say, once a few months. Definitely not often enough that I notice it as a major annoyance, on either Mac or Windows.

Now, Flash is annoying for other reasons, but crashing isn't one -- for me.

For me, Flash crashes multiple times every day in OS X 10.5. Clicktoflash is a godsend for Safari stability without plugin process separation.

(offer an anecdote, receive an anecdote.)

Anecdotes are fine. It's extrapolating to "It's always easy to spot people who make a living programming solely in Flash" that I'm taking an issue with.

Then you should have said that when you replied, not state that it wasn't an outlandish claim.

I don't make a living programming in Flash. :)

In most browsers you wouldn't know if it was Flash that crashed or the browser itself. In Chrome it is more explicit.

In most browsers you wouldn't know if it was Flash that crashed or the browser itself. In Chrome it is more explicit.

I've never had my browser crash on me either. Firefox-user on Windows here. To me Chrome seems to "fix" a problem I've never, ever had.

Well, I've seen Firefox crash numerous times on different platforms. Flash is more prone to crashing on OSX and Linux but I've seen Flash kill browsers on Windows (XP, Vista, 7) frequently enough to be quite aggravating.

It isn't just the crashing, it's also the annoyance of having some craptastic Flash banner ad taking way more than it's share of CPU. I've seen that on Windows and OS X.

The two words that make me close a site instantly: "Skip Intro".

So you like non-skippable intros better?

Yes. I also like intros that resize the window, fire off two or three Orbitz pop-unders, and launch a fake Windows 7 antivirus checker on my OSX Safari browser when I try to close it.

You're on Windows, aren't you?

Flash has issues with Windows 7. Big enough to be recognized in the support forums and given a dirty fix that only works half the time.

Flash causes my browser to become non-responsive every day at least once. But then I'm using 64-bit Linux with Flash Player 10 which is still in beta IIRC. Even so, it's the most noticeably poor aspect of my web experience. I could go back to FP9 but it was not much better and I don't want to loose full screen video.

Oh, that's one more plus for switching to Chrome browser I hadn't realised (I've been using Chrome for a few days exclusively; I do web dev so this is a big thing).

As uneasy as I am about what the iPad might say about the future of personal computing, if it can deliver the death blow to Adobe Flash then I'm all for it.

However, I do have my doubts. This article compares the iPad's Flash problems to Firefox's early problems with sites that were designed specifically for IE, but that's really an apples-to-oranges (Apples to Orange Foxes?) comparison. Firefox succeeded despite early incompatibilities because it targeted power users--the kinds of folks who can live with recurrent web browsing glitches, who can recognize broken sites and don't mind alt-tabbing back to IE where necessary.

But the iPad's target demographic isn't the power user, it's the technological neophyte. iPad users may be less tolerant of things not "just working", and the iPad may therefore have a harder time of bridging that incompatibility gap than Firefox did.

(And while Firefox users always had the option to fall back to IE--using Firefox and using IE were not mutually exclusive choices--what's the fallback option for iPad users when the content they want is only available with Flash? Carry a laptop with them, too?)

The lack of a fallback does seem to be the biggest issue. On the iPhone, it doesn't really matter, since none of the flash-based UIs would be usable on it anyways, so a separate version would still need to be developed. The iPad can afford somewhat PC-like interaction, so sites like Hulu could work if there was a flash plugin.

What reassures me that Flash is on it's way down is the way web technologies have advanced and been adopted despite IE's dominance and Microsoft's reluctance to properly implement CSS and other newer web features. When Firefox hit the scene, IE was far more dominant than Flash is now, and yet it managed to fight its way into the mainstream. Web sites are now written to follow the standards everywhere that it's convenient, and CSS and JS hacks are used to make it work in IE.

Sure, iPad users won't be as forgiving of broken sites as Firefox early adopters were, but their collective voice will be far more influential than the small band of rebels that broke the IE monopoly.

Gruber is right. I checked my site's stats, and to my surprise 8,4% of my visitors don't support flash.

Lots of other people on twitter are also checking their flash stats. You can see the results here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shareyourflashstats

I would be intrigued to see some big players announce their stats also but anyone of any size usually keeps stats close to their chests.

It would be interesting to see what the Flash stats for news.ycombinator.com are.

My favourite bit, regarding the infamous blue-boxes poster:

Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264.

Don't forget Gordon, the open source Flash runtime implemented in Javascript and HTML5: http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon

I don't think something like this will save Adobe's derriere though -- at best it'll be a fallback-option developers can use if they must include Falsh content.

It doesn't provide everything that flash does, and IIRC only supports flash animations. Some things that flash provides that JavaScript (at least JS provided by the server) can't provide: Webcam and microphone access (think sites like ustream and stickam), exact font control (there was a demo site a while back that showed the same site rendered on different browsers to demonstrate how much even the placement of fonts differed), etc.

I'm no proponent of Flash, but to say that Gordon can completely replace Flash is not the truth.

I'm liking John Gruber's posts more and more. Besides Paul Graham he might be favorite essayist right now.

I'm all for seeing Flash die a slow death. However, I wouldn't celebrate Apple for making the web more open: their AppStore is the worst proprietary/closed platform out there.

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