Video: Steve Jobs on Flash (D8 Conference) | Hacker News Reader

Video: Steve Jobs on Flash (D8 Conference)

d8.allthingsd.com

57 pointszach34 comments

I'm not entirely sure I can think of a legitimate argument against him, but Jobs tends to have that effect, doesn't he?

We can fuss and argue all we like, but his basic premise of "being selective about features is good for business" is pretty much impossible to argue with in light of Apple's financials.

There's a lot about New Apple that makes my skin crawl, but ditching Flash seems to make perfect sense. Ditching the floppy disk drive in 1998 seemed pretty outré, but it didn't take long for the USB flash drive to make it seem like a farsighted move. That's the thing about being ahead of your time - it only ever seems clever in hindsight.

Yeah. I've been building up a lot of frustration towards apple by trying to hack my iPad or iPhone and running into these walls.

But reading this interview chilled me way out. Steve is so calm and well spoken and deeply rooted in good business and capitalism for such a radical visionary, you can't really argue against him.

"...but ditching Flash seems to make perfect sense."

We'll see if that comment reigns true once FroYo 2.2 takes hold (if it does).

Reminds me of when Nintendo told me I didn't need to have HD because "real gamers" didn't want that. A lot of dusty Wiis out there.

Hrm. I wish this was the entire video, as opposed to an edited version.

EDIT: ok, they seem to be putting them up one by one: http://video.allthingsd.com/

It's not the full video, they're just splicing quotes together.

And they're using a crappy Flash video player that doesn't support full screen and keeps resetting when it runs out of bandwidth, despite pegging my CPU. How barbaric. (Once you're used to HTML5, it's hard to go back to the old way)

>>And they're using a crappy Flash video player that doesn't support full screen and keeps resetting when it runs out of bandwidth

That's pretty ironic, if you ask me.

Ironic or illuminating?

It did work on the iPad though, so it seems they are using HTML5 <video> as a fallback if you don't have Flash.

My first reaction was "they have it backwards!" But is it actually better to put Flash before HTML5 video? And if that is the case, for how long?

Flash really isn't able to run on devices slower than 1.5-2GHz and 500MB-1GB of RAM. It uses software rendering most of the time.

So really it is not obsolete, it is stuck in a gap in time that is well known and being taken advantage of. All software rendered animation and interactivity is slow on a device running < 1GHz even html5 content. Anything hardware rendered or accelerated is faster such as native or hardware hooks into canvas.

Adobe should have made flash hardware accelerated (or more hardware accelerated) to not be caught in this pickle in time where mobile is taking off but the hardware is still too slow. When devices get to 2GHz and 1GB memory flash will run fine. By then they should be hardware accelerated to provide a competitive advantage if they are smart.

I like Flash and html5 (<canvas>) and have no preference. Adobe made Flash, Apple made canvas and some key features of html 5 with supporting webkit which they open sourced very wisely. However html5 is still a few years off on web and flash is still a few years off on mobile. What happens next is anyone's game.

The problem is this: After a decade of promoting web standards and wrestling the web from Microsoft's hands, the most significant roadblock between the mobile web and the desktop web is a single 3rd-party plug-in from Adobe. This is a serious problem that Linux users know all too well! It's also a rather depressing problem to have in this, the year 2010.

One solution is to wait around for Adobe to get its act together. A lot of people don't like that solution. The iPhone has been out for three years now, and we've all seen the poor performance of the Android Flash demos, to which apologists cry "but you only have to enable Flash for web sites that really need it!" It's clear that we still have a long time to wait for Adobe; or we can promote Flash alternatives.

"and we've all seen the poor performance of the Android Flash demos"

Tell me you hate Flash, tell me you love open standards, tell me about a great alternative. Don't spew BS as fact, though, please.

"I am just blown away that this pop-up screen Flash heavy site even works as well as it does on a mobile phone." -- http://www.zdnet.com/blog/cell-phones/hands-on-with-android-...

"and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources." - http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/first-look-flash-andr...

The battery argument is weak, at best. If I leave my iPhone's iPod playing for 6 hours, my battery dies. If Flash drains it in 7 hours, there is an outcry about battery life.

What?

My Nexus One runs Flash surprisingly fine/smooth, with a lot less hardware requirements that you argue.

Also, if you didn't notice Flash is hardware accelerated. Just because Apples didn't open up the needed API it wasn't on Mac OS X. Stop blaming Adobe for Apples decision.

Other then that i agree. I've seen a lot of HTML5 demos in the last weeks (on latest chromium betas) and many of them are running slow with low fps. Demos that would've run smooth on Flash several years ago. HTML5 and the JS engines have to come a long way to fully replace Flash.

Running Flash on a Nexus One is the equivalent of running today's flash on a late 90's computer. It is not the speediest thing, that is a limitation of mobile hardware. For small apps sure, for games and pseudo 3d, not so much. Native mobile interfaces and apps will make it looks slow on that hardware range always.

Flash and software rendering get better around 2GHz cpu and 1GB ram. html5 and javascript have the same slowness issues unless someone hardware accelerates <canvas> or WebGL is integrated. Flash dabbled with OpenVG in Flashlite 3 but they could also do more there.

Flash is only partially hardware accelerated. For full screen scaling and the mobile versions of later flash lite and finally 10.1 (although still sparingly). It is a step in the right direction but sad in that Director had that in 2003. Flash was ahead and didn't need to innovate much. Unity3D came along, html5 came along, now they need to.

I have been developing in Flash since version 4 when you could start actually make games with it. I am not an html5 or flash fanboy, I like flash and use both (even silverlight, unity3d et). This is just the reality. There is a hardware gap in time that will be closed in the next few years. Flash is not dead unless Adobe does nothing with it.

What Jobs says is totally consistent from his perspective (or if you will, from within his reality distortion field): In a world, where there is only apple devices, Flash indeed has outlived its usefulness because there is no need for multi platform rich application/content development/authoring when there is only one platform left. Surely, that is how Jobs would like to perceive the state of affairs. Given how well Apple is currently doing in leading the mobile device space, his vision does seem to to converge with reality. Unless of course, the competition will get their act together and do something with Android that will have as much mainstream-appeal as the iPhone.

> In a world, where there is only apple devices, Flash indeed has outlived its usefulness because there is no need for multi platform rich application/content development/authoring when there is only one platform left.

If that is indeed Jobs' view, why is Apple putting so much effort into advancing open multiplatform technologies like HTML5 and WebGL? Surely if there was only one platform left, then everyone could write 3D content specifically for the iPhone OS. There wouldn't be a need for anyone to use WebGL, so why are they wasting their effort in implementing it in WebKit?

Here's another explanation. Jobs believes that in 2-3 years time, browsers and mobile CPUs will have advanced to the point where HTML5 is equivalent to Flash in most scenarios. So why bother wasting engineering resources on trying to get Flash working acceptably on the iPhone when the technology may be obsolete within a few years? Why not just get those engineers to instead work on improving JS performance in Mobile Safari?

I would like to know why people say "In a world, where there is only apple devices..." and make a claim. Please don't get angry or upset, but I am really curious. I think it comes across a bit negative.

As much as the hacker in me reveres "openness", I think Apple's approach will ultimately be a fantastic motivating challenge to open alternatives. Setting the UX bar high, and "game on".

Not really related, but isn't it a little bit sad that out of the 19 D8 speakers that are being emphasised on the right hand side panel only one is female?

I watched this using flash.

And the experience pretty much sucked. Their Flash player leaves a lot to be desired. I loaded it on my iPad, just so I could watch using <video>.

"What to exclude and What to include in a product is part of making a product.That's what the customers pay us for, to make great products. If we succeed, they'll buy them. If not, they won't." - simple. I think the expiry date on the Apple-Flash press mania has reached and it's time to move on...

He seems angry... like he's really offended that people are criticizing his decision to leave out Flash from the iPad. He says he wants the market to decide. But when the market decides, then it's too late. Even diehard Apple fans are not happy Flash can't be viewed on the iPad. Big opportunity for Android tablets, courtesy of Steve Jobs and company.

uh... sorry to break this to you, but they sold 2 million ipads in less than 60 days. I think the market doesn't seem to care. Not sure how the future will pan out, but they are way ahead of everyone else, just like they were with ipod and then iphone (touch phone market share) and now with ipad.

If apple would have decided to go with flash I think they would have to compromise on battery performance. They did ask adobe to give them a less power hungry, more stable flash build for ipad, which they didn't. Anyone who uses an apple computer will tell you how ridiculous it is to play flash videos (or anything) on a mac. Your machine will go on hyper-drive, and your browser will crash frequently.

Adobe has a history of working slowly on flash, which had horrible stability along all platforms not too long ago, while its definitely much better on Windows in recent times, it didn't improve much on OSX. Their next release for mobile is already delayed twice AFAIK. I think this speaks volumes about Adobe software development. I am hardly an apple apologist, but if there is anyone to be blamed for the omission of flash on ipad, its adobe.

iPhone was released 3 years ago, and Adobe still doesn't have a good flash player for mobile or mac.

*and your browser will crash frequently

I keep seeing this claim all the time. Flash is a complete resource hog, i agree. But my mac/browser has never crashed because of Flash, since i bought this in 2007. Mind showing me a flash site that could crash my mac/browser?

This was my experience while using Firefox with flash on OSX for as long as I can remember. I had the same problem with safari, but I haven't use safari on mac for a long time, so I can't verify that. I only use Chrome now and before the recent update where they integrated flash beta player into Chrome[1], Chrome also used to crash very frequently. Even apple revealed that "based on data from the Crash Reporter application built into Mac OS X — the thing that asks if you’d like to send crash data to Apple after a crash — the most frequent cause of crashes across all of Mac OS X are “plugins”" [2].

[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/bringing-improved-support-f... [2] http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash

Here's a bunch of them: http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byurl/Firefox/3.6....

That's not just Flash sites, that's all sites that crash Firefox, but on a quick skim I couldn't see any that didn't involve Flash.

Bear in mind that you are one person, and your mileage may vary. I'm glad you've had better luck than I.

Software changes over time (both the browser, and the flash plugin, and the flash code deployed on web pages) so asking someone to reference a particular site that will crash your particular browser won't help you understand what's going on. A better idea might be a few clever search strings:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=safari+crash+log+flash

Or, alternatively, you can look at the architecture of chrome and ask why they put tabs in separate processes, and why mozilla is also putting protection in place:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/03/mozilla-prev...

Apple isn't just making a wild conjecture when they say that Flash is the leading cause of browser crashes. They get stack traces sent to them by the crash reporting mechanism, and they get to count how many crashes come from what region of code. Drawn from sample sizes in the millions, this constitutes measurement.

OP says "your browser will crash frequently". Most of the replies (including yours) to my question only points to crash logs that cant be reproduced .Your answer is a very generic explanation on software development.

And that is exactly what i am saying. I keep seeing all these people complaining about Flash , but no one has a proof that actually works.

As i mentioned before, Flash is a complete resource hog on the mac but no one here has a solid reproducible proof for "frequent crashes".

I choose not to believe in Apple's claims and numbers, as they are in open war with Adobe now on the issue. Opening up Flash on iPad and iPhone is lost business for app store(if you own an iPad/iPhone, you already know that currently there is no decent html5 application that work properly on these devices.)

Call stack traces are not generic. They point to specific places. Those places are aggregated and counted. You're free to disbelieve that Apple is reporting their #1 source of crashes honestly, but you should take a look at the Top Crash link provided by ZeroGravitas. If you're not seeing the same pattern, you're not looking without bias.

http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byurl/Firefox/3.6....

My experience with imac with a snow leopard is not crashing much(firefox)(it has crashed two times in two months), but yes I have a lot of problems I had not with Linux flash with the mac one.

I think he probably was a bit angry that Adobe kept acting like they had Flash waiting-in-the-wings for the iPhone OS over the last couple of years yet it appears they're in the alpha/beta stage at best.

>Even diehard Apple fans are not happy Flash can't be viewed on the iPad

Really? I'm not even an Apple fanboy (only recently started switching to the platform) and if it weren't for all the hoopla I don't think I'd have even noticed it wasn't there. youtube works. There are more free games in the app store than I would probably have time left in my life to play. I suppose now that you mention it, I don't see as many stupid ads when surfing.

Even diehard Apple fans are not happy Flash can't be viewed on the iPad.

Some of us aren't. Some of us are rejoicing that someone has stood up against this blight and completely forbade it from their system.

That they have such a desirable closed curated system is a bit creepy, but at least in this case they are using that power for good.

I hope Apple is the first of many.

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