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Comment by jamesk2 | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs hates flash for a lot of reasons but it is mostly because flash runs faster/better on Windows than on Mac OS. This article quantifies what people who use Mac, Windows and Linux know already: Flash is a hog outside of Windows.

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It's a hog inside windows, too.

Ha. It is but I think the point is that even before GPU assistance, Flash works better in Windows than on the Mac. It makes sense for Steve Jobs to pressure Adobe into improving the Mac version. HTML5 is turning out to be the hammer that forces Adobe to innovate.

I just wonder why the exact flv that makes the flashplayer in Firefox go bananas with CPU use can be played by mplayer without breaking a sweat.

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different...

Which, for those who haven't read it, is an Adobe employee saying that Flash is inherently slow for displaying video, and they have no intention of changing this.

Currently all the HTML5 video implementations suffer from the same issue, but I've never heard them state that they have no intention of addressing it.

A lot of that isn't Adobe's fault though, the only browser on OSX currently supporting Core Animation (the most efficient API for drawing to the canvas) is Safari 4. Core Animation drawing has been implemented in 10.1 and at the moment my (rough) tests show it to run up to 60% faster in Safari than Chrome. Obviously still nowhere near Windows standards, but it's a great improvement.

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