Flash 10.1 on Nexus One is not a battery hog | Hacker News Reader

Flash 10.1 on Nexus One is not a battery hog

flashmobileblog.com

I'm not speaking one way or the other about Flash, but I'm so sick of Adobe/Flash being so pitifully defensive about Flash on mobile devices and the iPad.

Someone in the community is going to be a Flash hater. Someone is going to cry about battery life. Flash is on the N1, you win, now start talking about the awesomeness it DOES bring!

What kind of company spends this amount of time talking about the crappiest part of their product?

An explanation is fine, but to go on and get weird about by talking about potential percentage levels in a few Vimeo videos. That just seems so odd to me. How many of their users actually saw this video?

"What kind of company spends this amount of time talking about the crappiest part of their product?"

There is a lot of BS out there regarding Flash.

For example, on HN I can up my karma easily by just hating on Flash. I don't need prove it or show evidence. As long as I am part of the "gang" mentality, then I am welcome to shoot my mouth off.

So then there are those who wanna see evidence (crazy people, I know!). We get scenarios like these -- where the debunker must over explain, over analyze and over emphasize to get the message across.

Adobe gets so much hate, in my mind, it is worth their time to fight all of the unsupported bs that is thrown their direction.

I mean if you called my mother a whore everyday for 10 years to my face, at some point I would punch you. This is Adobe throwing punches.

As for Adobe talking about the good parts of their product, they do it all of the time. Read through their other posts on that blog, and you will see all kinds of interesting innovative content such as http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2009/08/12/flash-development-... http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2010/02/25/acrobat-connect-pr... http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2010/02/03/iphone-testing-geo... and http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2009/11/06/max-award-winners-...

This is the Flash Mobile blog, there is also a platform blog with a lot of interesting stuff on it as well.

I'm not a flash lover, but I think there is something to brand defense, and if that gets them publicity, when their interesting work does not, then why should they stop?

This is a deceptive demonstration. The video is H.264, which can be hardware accelerated on many chipsets. This means Flash may be doing very little work, and undermines their goal of showing that Flash is an efficient runtime. A more revealing test would be a traditional FLV, since the argument for Flash is that it supports "innovation" and wrapping open, hardware accelerated formats is rather later in the game.

The performance test I want to see is the most common one: a text page with a Flash banner ad, versus a text page. Adobe would never show it because this (most common) scenario is the worst case. What would be a 1% CPU situation becomes something between 5% and 100%, based entirely on the (in)competence of the (poorly compensated) designer who slapped it together for the ad agency.

I see your point, however, I don't see a compared alternative. If you had compared it to a canvas-driven animated banner or a HTML5+JS driven video player perhaps? Still 1%?

Doubtful.

I doubt that anyone would seriously employ a canvas based video player with the advent of the HTML5 video tag. However, your implication that JS can also chew up CPU is valid. I have no defense except to say that the browser vendors have fine grained control over JS, while Flash is an opaque box. For instance, the browser could restrict setTimeout to a lower framerate, which has a different (better) effect than simply limiting the CPU.

It's incredibly trendy to beat up on Flash. How come whenever the conversation of Flash vs. JS+HTML5 comes up and we've all circulated our points of view, a sudden "dream world" emerges to save the argument?

I tire of defending the present-day reality vs. the someday utopia that Flash-bashers seem to hold so dear.

HTML5+JS is great, I love it. But no one who pays for content cares. We wouldn't even be discussing this if the opposite were true.

> Without optimizing your applications, Flash or otherwise, they can perform badly on any platform this is 101 for any software developer.

Don't the two paragraphs following that quote pretty much gut Adobe's standard pitch? That we need Flash on mobile devices so we can access content that already exists on the web?

Their own evangelists are (rightly) recommending that anyone serious about a mobile product needs to design and test for those devices and that simply pointing a touch-based mobile at an flv designed for PCs with keyboards and mice is not going to work.

But that being the case, why isn't the argument for Flash about its comparative advantages vs per-device apps, HTML5, etc?

It's not as if there isn't a compelling and rational case to be made there.

Great, Adobe, so you are able to code something properly. So now maybe you'll think about addressing the Mac and Linux plugins? Which are still horrible?

I don't know about Linux, but the 10.1 plugin for the Mac (currently in beta) I believe is supposed to have significantly better performance -- ahead of the Windows version, in some cases.

I may have to install the beta and test before I sell my MacBook...

I've got it installed, actually, so I can give some basic feedback.

10.1 is definitely faster when playing h.264 movies. I used Vimeo as an example, and CPU use by Flash alone went from ~95% to ~85%. Hooray! It also seems like it might be more responsive playing other content, but I don't really do that because most other Flash content is junk.

Note, if anyone is thinking of trying it out: some websites don't work because they check that your Flash version is '10' and not '>= 10'. A friend who upgraded had to use a website that required flash, but was unable to. This is obviously a developer problem, not a flash problem, but be aware.

Oh, and you can't downgrade. Once you upgrade, you're stuck (unless you are willing to dig around).

In the end, I don't care. I already block flash because most uses of flash are obnoxious and irritating; now with 10.1, I can block a newer, more responsive version of Flash. Sorry Adobe, it's great that you're pretending you care and all, but it's too little too late. You've ignored us for years, you stuck us with a shitty Flash player and now you're telling us how lucky we are to have had it. I'm done with you.

You definitely can downgrade — you just have to download the uninstaller from Adobe's website [1] before reinstalling 10.0. After giving 10.1 a try and it being so ridiculously buggy, I had to give up.

  [1]: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

Funny thing is that in the recent blog post about fixing issues with the Mac plugin, people complained about Linux and mobile browsing.

Why's it funny? The Linux plug-in /is/ terrible.

I think his point is no matter what Adobe fixes or does right, many people on HackerNews are strictly anti-Flash and insist on adding Strawman and other noob debating responses.

And fixing all those Acrobat vulns

I find it interesting that the example they use is 'playing h.264 video', something which the Nexus One can do hardware-accelerated. How many hours of actual animation does it get when it doesn't get to offload 90% of its work to dedicated silicon?

OK, but it's still proprietary and closed-source. Fix that, then we can worry about how much battery it uses.

Then can we also look at how far the standard would have advanced as open-source? Maybe considered that H.264 is in fact NOT an open standard?

I want to live in the magic world where open-source development moves as fast as proprietary as well, but I can't.

You must love working with IIS.

IIS is terrible. Microsoft innovates at the speed of open-source. No contest there.

There are plenty of Free implementations of H.264.

Who's using them? Adobe isn't. Firefox, WebKit? Nope.

Chromium on Linux uses ffmpeg's (open-source) h.264 implementation. Firefox doesn't use it because they are making a policy stand, "Theora or nothing." Technically, h.264 would work fine, it would just be illegal to distribute in countries with software patents.

mplayer also uses ffmpeg's h.264 code, and I am sure VLC does too. In other words, every open-source video application that can play h.264 uses an open-source h.264 implementation.

Remember, there are no technical problems with h.264. It is a good algorithm with plenty of good (and Free) implementations. The problem is that the group that patented h.264 wants money every time you encode a video with h.264, upload a video encoded with h.264, and play a video with h.264. Because the Internet will suck when this happens, people are trying to ensure it doesn't. (Killing Adobe will help, because they make money from giving away h.264 licenses that they already paid for, and hence are demanding that Theora not be in the HTML5 spec they are writing.)

Thank you for your thorough insight. I appreciate a good explanation with facts :)

There is a comment below that I can't reply to (it was auto-killed as spam) that says:

Do you use an iPhone or any Apple products? How about a cable box? Is the software in your coffee maker open source? How about the bios in your PC?

I do not use any programmable devices with proprietary software. I don't have an iPhone, I don't have cable, and I don't have a coffee maker. (I do make coffee, but it consists of pouring boiling water on top of coffee grinds. No computer needed!) I do use the closed-source nVidia driver, but only because I can't buy an Intel-based card for my desktop. The GSM chip on my mobile phone also runs proprietary software, but only because the government won't allow one with open-source software to be sold in the US. Other than that, no.

(No, I don't use the "Google Experience" Android apps. No source code, so if I hit a bug, I wouldn't be able to fix it. No need to even risk getting upset.)

My washing machine and microwave also use proprietary software. Technically I don't own them, though, so I don't feel that bad. (If I were buying appliances, I would gladly pay a couple hundred $$ more for open-source software. But that is not available to me. I have lamented this fact on my blog a number of times, because both devices have annoying bugs that I or the community could have fixed.)

Sometimes I use Flash if someone tells me there's something really interesting that I need to see. But generally it's disabled, precisely because I can't even try to fix the bugs. It is a privacy leak, doesn't work with my sound card correctly, and uses excessive CPU for almost everything. All fixable, but I'm not even allowed to try.

Fuck that. Life is too short to worry about buggy software that can't be fixed.

This sentence: "Bloggers ... spent a little more time than expected studying the battery indicators, as opposed to the incredible advancements in web browsing for mobile phones." Having Flash on my mobile is not an advancement in web browsing, on mobile or desktop: People block Flash for a reason, and that sentence just comes across as arrogant.

Instead of blogging about it, they need to release it so we can see what it's like for ourselves.

7 hours of rated battery life down to 3 hours with flash? Not a battery hog at all.

The rated "7 hours of video" is for video stored on the device rather than streamed over the internet; note that the same Nexus One specs[1] claim only 5 to 6.5 hours of internet usage (5hr for 3G and 6.5hr for wifi).

It's not surprising that doing both at once will run down the battery about twice as fast.

[1]: http://www.google.com/phone/static/en_US-nexusone_tech_specs...

Heck, I probably only get 4 hours of solid Robo Defense play (a native android app that doesn't access the internet).

Keeping that backlight lit is going to use up the battery no matter what you're doing.

steve jobs lied? wtf, really?

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