Jobs: Flash would murder the iPad. Really now, let’s be realistic | Hacker News Reader

Jobs: Flash would murder the iPad. Really now, let’s be realistic

crunchgear.com

13 pointsfjabre34 comments

On Windows, Flash has tunnels to your video card to let its hugely parallel processors burst-decode a ton of information at a time. It can’t do that on OS X, from what I understand — mainly because Apple doesn’t want them to.

I can't believe this. VLC does not use 70% CPU to decode a 720p video, and it's not using any hardware acceleration other than an overlay. (Or maybe it renders to a texture; either way, it works fine even with a GMA950.)

It also appears that vidix supports OS X, which lets you actually offload video decoding to your nVidia card. (Edit: maybe I'm wrong, I was thinking of VDPAU, not vidix.)

So... I call "LIES" on this. Apple loves arbitrary restrictions, but OS X does not have many. You can make your GPU do whatever you want, even on Apple hardware.

I found this linked from an old Hacker News article:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.

I didn't say Adobe wasn't lazy. mplayer can use the hardware acceleration of my nVidia card, so I don't see why Flash can't. It's just programming.

It's fine with me, though. I would like to see Adobe and Apple both die in a big PR fireball, and that looks to be where this is all leading anyway.

Flash 10.1 has been in public beta for less than 6 months, and only accelerates decoding on minority hardware. A few percent of their install base has it, tops. Flash on Windows decodes video at unaccelerated libavcodec speeds just fine without it.

They're pushing this angle because it makes them out to be the heroes -- see the passive-aggressive spiel you get when you visit the Flash page on an iPhone -- they'd love to frame everything as "if only Apple would let us". Unfortunately it's not true in the slightest.

Nobody's shipping a full Flash player for Android or WebOS because it doesn't exist. Maemo can use a standard desktop NSAPI plugin, but Nokia+Mozilla won't ship the one Adobe has compiled for them because it's too shitty. All of this has been "6 months away" for years now, going back to the Macromedia days.

I just went to youtube in the default browser on my Maemo phone. The flash plugin is installed, but Mozilla are ignoring it in the Firefox for Maemo because of all the crashes.

Flash isn't one of the foundational technologies of the web.

If it has to use the embed or object tags, it is not foundational.

That's as far down the page as I got. I was willing to ignore his suggestion that Jobs has no idea what he's talking about (willing suspension I guess), but after reading that a proprietary vendor plug-in is "foundational" to the web, I lost all interest. No one owes Adobe anything. If Apple sells an "Internet"Pad that doesn't run Flash, and people buy and use them then that says Flash isn't a required feature.

Simple as that.

Personally I've been running ClickToFlash and Flashblock and find the web a better place. I only click boxes that I expect to see video in.

This is exactly right.

Flash is a plugin for the web, and unfortunately for its creators, it has not evolved enough to be of clearly superior use in another capacity. A while ago Flash replaced Java for embedded interactive media content on the web. Java did not disappear because Java could be used to do other things. Would GE Medical Systems write their diagnostic imaging software in Flash? I think we all know that would not happen. But GE would be fine using Java, and so would the FDA who audits their software before it can go to market.

My point is, Flash is going to go away. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month, but eventually it will go away. And it will go away because its creators did not innovate and keep evolving it so that it would be useful in a changed environment. This is the tech industry, the environment always changes. Even worse for those who want to keep doing what they were good at yesterday, it changes in unexpected ways.

Let every entrepreneur on this board take what is happening to Flash right now as a cautionary tale. Let's not rail against it, we should learn from it. This is how we evolve the American technology industry, by taking these lessons to heart.

> This is how we evolve the American technology industry, by taking these lessons to heart.

Why only the American one ?

Because the other countries only really exist in movies, obviously.

Boring, indie movies.

They could call up Adobe and say “Hey guys, Flash is blowing it in our OS, why don’t we get a few guys together and work it out?” But they won’t.

Hmmm... It seems to me that Apple has called Adobe up for years to get a few guys together and help Adobe move their apps up to Apple's latest APIs, to run native instead of emulated, and all sorts of other stuff, and Adobe has always dragged its heels.

I'm guessing Apple and Adobe just don't get along and it isn't as simple as saying that Steve doesn't like them.

If the problem with Flash performance on Mac OS was solely due to Apple being uncooperative, why does it work just as poorly on Linux?

I really hope this fight seriously diminishes the popularity of both Flash and the iPhone platform. Apple and Adobe are both working against the interests of users in trying to insure the continued relevance of their platforms.

I'd be fine if flash disappeared.

I wouldn't, how would I enjoy one of the few fine animations on Newgrounds: http://www.reddit.com/r/animation/comments/b24nd/the_wonderf... or enjoy another round of Fancy Pants Adventure: http://www.kongregate.com/games/DrNeroCF/fancy-pants-adventu... ?

Perhaps... but the idea of cross-platform web plugins should not go away in the process. There's still a lot of room for innovation on the web. Let plugins be the prototype, and let HTML eventually adopt the ones that succeed.

Apple is moving in a direction where you cannot write browser plugins.

That's true. Flash has served us well over the years but it's just not needed any more.

Uh... what? The author didn't even provide a reason for why we're not ready to use HTML5 <video> tags instead of Flash. He says that "Flash is the acknowledged standard", whatever that means, however <video> actually is a web standard.

There are two kinds of standards, de-facto and what a piece of paper says. <video> is a piece of paper, Flash is de-facto.

(Not that I would ever use Flash on my site, of course, but I can't dictate policy to the Wider Internet.)

Flash wouldn't murder the iPad, it would murder the appstore, and that's why you won't see it on any apple mobile devices.

The battery life issues are something that could easily be taken care of with some optimizations.

So Flash on OSX has been complete crap for years because...? And you want me to believe that "oh, on the iPad/iPhone it will be different" because...? Oh, right, 10.1 will fix all sorts of problems that couldn't be fixed for years because...?

Mostly because of inaccessible layers of code, not much to do with Adobe, more to do with apple. If apple would open up some of the lower layers then this stuff could get a lot faster.

And how is it that other third party software mysteriously has access to APIs that Flash allegedly doesn't? For example, MPlayer is able to offload work to the GPU.

Murder the App Store? How so? I'm always confused by such statements. They don't seem to make any sense. Enlighten me.

Games are a big part of the App Store and if tons of Flash games existed it would reduce that market substantially for games in the App Store.

Exactly. A large amount of the stuff in the app store is fluff that is already available for flash, and plenty of the 'apps' are re-writes for the iphone platform of existing .swf files. That's what makes it worth to the users to pay for them, the fact that they're not available for free through an alternative channel. A large part of the app stores market would dry up overnight if flash support were added to the iphone as an out-of-the-box feature.

That's a stupid definition of murder.

I agree, but it wasn't my title...

And how exactly would keyboard + mouse Flash games would work with accelerometers and multiple intermittent cursors work?

Even if the Flash player was a pinnacle of engineering, the existing content doesn't make any sense for the context.

Flash wouldn't kill the app store any more than html5 will.

Exactly. Remember how it would be a disaster if we could install non-approved apps because they would take out the cell network? Somehow that has failed to happen despite millions of Android phones capable of running apps from anywhere.

Not to mention all the BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile phones, and Symbian phones that have been running "unapproved" apps long before the iPhone apps store ever existed. All the apps running on those phones never caused any havoc for the cell phone networks.

Relying on client side security in a cell phone network would border on criminally stupid anyway.

Assuming Apple provided the necessary API, and Adobe implemented them, is there any reason Flash couldn't decode a video almost as efficiently as the iPad's media player?

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