Adobe CTO talks Flash performance on Macs, more
blogs.adobe.com
blogs.adobe.com
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[Way to parrot Welch. Anyway, you're of course right that Flash should never crash. My beef is that suddenly we hear this HUGE groundswell of people saying that Flash is bringing them to ruin. Could it be that maybe--just maybe--some of these claims are overstated out of some tribalism (a desire to be close to Apple)? I mean, people identify with groups of multimillionaires who theoretically represent some nearby city in sports, so it's not hard to see why they want to identify with the people who make the devices they use all day.
I'm not saying that Flash never crashes. I'm saying that a certain corps of people are eagerly overstating the problem out of some desire to bond with Apple, to be part of something bigger and shinier than themselves.
The beauty part for them is that the claims are unquantifiable and unfalsifiable: I guarantee you're not seeing crash log data from Apple, so unless we go to your house and watch all day to see whether your browser ever crashes (and if then the problem is actually due to Flash & not, say, Saft, Glims, Inquisitor, etc.), we're talking about impressions, not real data. --J.]
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So if you're having Flash issues in OSX, odds are you're just a lying fanboy.
[edit an hour later: that's how I read it, and I could of course be off base. I mean, he isn't calling everyone a liar but you can't really look at a large group of people and say "50% of you are full of shit" without casting aspersions on all of them. Also, as someone who has been bitching about Flash on Linux and OSX for most of this century, I take offense to the idea that "everything was peachy keen until Apple whipped up a fuss over nothing" (again, I paraphrase from my own perspective).]
Fedora 12 has an "automatic bug reporting tool" that is annoying in that it often shows up when you aren't expecting it, or when you know something crashed that Fedora folks can't do anything about -- so I've usually opted not to submit the things it wants to report. But that may be a losing battle in the long run, since more data collected could actually get bugs fixed, and then there are statistics on how frequently crashes are a problem for people. Thing is, I know how much bogus stuff gets collected with these kinds of tools, and it's difficult to sift through, so in some sense, I think I'm actually helping them by not submitting things I think may be bogus.
Are there many people here running OS X that don't have problems apparently caused by Flash?
It seems that neither Adobe nor Apple actually want to make a good experience for users, flash or otherwise, because independent of whose fault it is the problems are not getting addressed. I'm reminded of http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html, where Microsoft actually cared about the user experience enough to insert a massive kludge even though the bug wasn't their fault. And since the problems are not getting addressed, I'd be leery of using either Apple or Adobe products. Apple because they would rather destroy a product they don't like even though the users do, and Adobe because of the way they treat their products after release. Apple's defense is that they prefer the new and shiny vs the old and busted (which are subjective measurements). For years Apple was behind Flash, it was one of the reasons to use a Mac, at least for flash development. Apple was also behind Firewire for years, it was so much better than USB. Then all of a sudden it wasn't, much to the detriment of those people who had bought all that highend firewire hardware. Now, this usually ends up being good for the consumer, which is why Jobs has the reputation he does, and in Apple's defense, their standard MO of controlling the entire platform means they have to make the "hard" decisions about what they support, and it usually ends up being good all around, but the transition, when Jobs changes his mind, can be a real bitch.
What detriment? Apple only ships two models without FireWire, neither of which cater to the sort of person who owns a lot of high-end FireWire kit anyway.
Flash may be the main cause of Safari crashes, but, well, my Safari never really crashes anyway.
But until Apple gets out there with clear and honest executive communication, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.
(On the good side, Safari team has been permitted to communicate with the Player team, and some of these problems may be addressed. We're still seeking Apple Corps approval to decompress video off the CPU on their computers. It's their business decision to make.)
It is entirely unreasonable to assume that there is any statistically significant proportion of those plugin crashes that aren't Flash (well, maybe a few Java crashes...). Apple can't publicly blame Flash with any specificity, because they can't have Flash for OS X get abandoned until their mobile strategy has mostly killed Flash anyways. But they still have the raw data and stack traces. And that data indicates that Flash is by far the most crash-prone app on most Macs.
I've got a slow connection on my Mac at home, and have consistently used Flash-blockers and ad-blockers over the years to control what's pushed to me. Even so, Firefox and Safari regularly stall and require a restart. May be my Mac, though.
The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins. Java applets et al are so rare that Flash might as well be the only plugin that is used.
Whether or not your web browser crashes when it isn't using Flash is completely off-topic, unless you are trying to insinuate that Apple can't even tell from a stack dump where the crash originated. In which case, you're taking an awfully roundabout way to calling Apple incompetent liars.
Indeterminate. The logs show that Flash made a call. It didn't show where that call went when it failed. (I usually run Safari and Firefox in parallel on my Mac because both have stability problems, despite using a Flash blocker.) Most of the Player code is the same across OS, only the outer wrappers and connecting APIs differ.
On the happy side, there has recently been some increased cooperation with the Safari team, and when combined with the mobile optimizations you can expect to see some of the gains described by Kevin Lynch: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_...
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[Adobe can't fix what they can't reproduce. I'm sure they work very hard to eliminate any and all instability from the Flash Player on all platforms. If they don't, they end up living in a world of PR hell.]
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So if you're having Flash issues on OSX, the bug reporting tool is here: https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/
Currently there are 4 bugs containing the text 'crash' where the environment is OSX. None of them have any votes, watchers or comments apart from one which has a comment from Adobe saying they can't reproduce it. On that evidence, it's hard to see why Adobe would believe crashing on OSX is a critical problem.
If people were straight up, and focused on trying to solve a problem, that'd be one thing. Sudden swells of anonymous turfing is another. Apple won't even go on-the-record with their executive-level smears, for goshsakes... what kind of corporate culture is that?
Adobe has been an abusive monopoly in the streaming video market. It's only when a large company controversially decides to try to break that monopoly that people come out of the woodwork to cheer what may be the downfall of a product that truly sucks. Prior to Apple taking on Flash, it was a foregone conclusion that Flash sucks, but it was a necessary evil.
We don't know that you're not shilling.
Hope the next version will be that big improvement that we've been waiting for, but I won't hold my breath.
i watch episodes of the daily show on thedailyshow.com every other day or so, using safari on mac os 10.5.8 on a mac mini. just about every single time i watch an episode in full screen, exit full screen, and click on a different episode, safari will crash and the crash reporter comes up saying flash caused it. i click 'report' to report the bug, it looks like it does something, and then i re-open safari.
this guy says flash doesn't ship with any "known bugs", but what are "known bugs"?
If you are experiencing issues please report them directly to the Flash engineering team via the public bug database and the team will investigate and resolve each.
oh, so only bugs they know about in their public bug database, which requires 1) a user to know about it, 2) the user to seek it out, 3) the user to signup for an account, 4) and the user to login and file a formal bug, all while that user just saw a dialog that says his crash information was just sent to someone.
if that crash reporter from safari is not sending useful information over to adobe, then they need to work with apple to get that resolved.
Suddenly, it's Adobe who's coming out as the sympathetic market leader, and Apple has to turn and defend its stance as anti-Flash from a non-technical standpoint. As Apple is forced to make its pro-App Store stance official (even though all of us here understand it) they'll get looked by the masses as as a monopoly-maker or as a company that stifles outside development.
Well, they are.
Kevin's stats were comparing CPU-decompression of video, which should get closer to parity.
Apple's APIs would be easier to use, were they to provide guidance and resources more like Microsoft does. Stark difference.
Adobe has stated that the APIs aren't sufficient, but I haven't seen any of you explain what exactly you do need. If you're looking for an API to specifically feed data to a dedicated decode chip, you're doing it wrong, because hardware abstraction is the operating system's job.
If it's merely a problem of the Quicktime APIs being hard to use, then you deserve a swift bankruptcy for complaining about it publicly rather than learning how to program properly on a Mac.
The simple fact remains that Flash is so resource-hungry that it is undeniably badly written. On my machine, with a Radeon X1600 GPU that doesn't have any useful h.264 acceleration, playing a certain h.264 video with a resolution of 640x360 causes Flash 10.1 beta 2 to use on average 90% CPU, whereas Quicktime Player playing from a file uses a steady 16%. Flash is wasting three quarters of my CPU cycles on overhead. Yes, I can understand a difference of a few points due to extra layers of IPC and the networking code, but even if I'm generous, the latest-and-greatest Flash pre-release is throwing away every other clock cycle that my CPU has.
Edit: I tested the video on VLC as well, to make extra sure that there is no home-field hardware acceleration advantage for QuickTime. VLC uses about 18% CPU. Flash's software decoder is 4-5 times slower than it should be.
Then you'd have to do version-checks, if you're actually delivering content to audiences. Fewer people have it, fewer people use the current version. Most codecs on content sites are H.264 or On2 VP6 (successor to Theora). Easier to solicit Apple to open up their acceleration APIs to plugins.
<em>"The simple fact remains that Flash is so resource-hungry that it is undeniably badly written."</em>
You're quite incorrect.
As to the current performance of the latest Flash beta, what is your justification for Flash requiring five times the computational resources of other video players? What is Flash doing that is not only more intensive than h.264 decoding, but four times more intensive?
Adobe is finally moving some of the flash processing to the GPU. Too little, too late? Or better late than never?
For the vast majority of users, being Windows based, flash works pretty much fine most of the time. At this moment in time a lack of good flash support is more of a problem for apple then adobe. If Adobe will manage to get a good droid flash port, then this tiff will turn more barbed.
i am reminded that the whole issue was really sparked not over the flash client on the desktop or laptops and its supposed performance, but rather its lack of its existence on the iphone and future ipad, of which apple is rightly criticized.
Most people who denigrate flash on osx, still have it installed, you can always avoid installing it, and keep the system pristine and flash free, but you install it nonetheless, why? because you want to see flash generated content.
while performance and stability of flash is indeed an issue, the decision not to have it on said platforms is much less due to bad code and much more because Flash undermines the entire app store ecosystem, it is easier to create a native app experience on Flash and ActionScript than it is using the iPhone SDK and Objective-C. There are really great Flash games, think what this fact alone can do to app store revenue, and of course there is the benefit of wider range of developers too.
Suppose they revamp the code of flash on OSX, its blazing fast and stable, i still doubt apple will include support for it on its cash cows.
If they don't do this, Flash is dead, which is stupid imo because they could still make a lot of money off of the IDE.
This, on the week that Jonathan Schwartz officially steps down? ;)
Anyway, if HTML5 does replace Flash, what difference would open sourcing make?
For reference, check out damn near anything computer related.
If HTML5 gets similar market share to Flash, I imagine in the long run most content publisher will choose the one that's better supported and easier to implement rather than maintain support for both - for the same reason that many now choose only Flash, rather than Flash+Silverlight+whatever.
Flash already meets a large portion of the needs addressed by HTML5 but Adobe's blobs are almost universally inadequate. HTML5 immediately becomes less attractive in the face of an open Flash, as Flash has a huge library of existing content, a huge base of existing developers, and Flash does much of what HTML5 does, but Flash is ill-favored right now because Adobe holds it far too close to chest.
An open Flash would mean implementation on the iPhone and other important platforms.
Some might say it's too late for that, but I don't agree. Flash is on the brink right now; if it opens, it can have a place forever. If it stays closed, it will die away forever in favor of HTML5.
What if Adobe acted more like an ActionScript standardization committee than the exclusive Flash vendor? Leave the implementation to groups who can customize it according to their needs (like, maybe they need Flash to work on a capacitive multi-touch device, or maybe they need it to work well on a non-Windows OS or non-x86 platform).
Flash wants to play as an integral part of the web, but it will never be able to last if it doesn't get free. The internet was able to grow to what it is today because it is built on free techs.
Flash is at the point where it has outgrown single-entity control and needs to be opened if it is to retain its ubiquity. The web runs on all kinds of devices and platforms and they all have special needs -- if you want to play here, you can't expect everyone to conform to your single distributed blob. Openness is the only way to keep prominence as a widespread web technology.
It's a little late, but I think Flash could still be saved if Adobe opened it now. Otherwise, it will shortly be killed by open alternatives like HTML5.