MacBook Air ships without Flash
engadget.com
engadget.com
My biggest complaint is sIFR text replacement. Seriously, using Flash just to serve up a certain font for your H1 or H2 titles is complete and utter crap.
While I do think that this is bad user experience for those buying the MacBook Air, it should help foster an overall better user experience for the Internet.
With Flash not coming standard and Apple gaining so much market share, it will only be a matter of time before the percent of Flash enabled browsers falls enough that web developers need to start using more appropriate standards-based techniques.
Adobe claims that Flash reaches 99% of browsers: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/
Once that hits 95%, I think we'll start seeing a tipping point. About 68% of web browsers worldwide currently have partial HTML5 support (IE8+, Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 6.0+, Safari 5.0+, Opera 10+). That number is 72% in the US.
I give it two years until Flash and HTML5 are at parity with one another.
I'm the biggest flash hater there is, I only started using it November last year for one specific feature that we no longer could talk our way around (video+audio) and it is really amusing to see history repeat like this.
Adobe isn't going anywhere, and, unfortunately, neither is flash. 'just' video is not going to suddenly make everybody drop flash.
> While I do think that this is bad user experience for those buying the MacBook Air, it should help foster an overall better user experience for the Internet.
Reducing the user experience for any group does not increase the user experience for the whole.
What it might do is foster standardization in the long run. But don't forget that Apple is not doing this from the good of their heart to help open standards, but simply because flash competes with the App store.
It is no coincidence that flash gets dropped from the MBA at the same time that the app store for the Mac gets launched.
I don't agree with this decision, though. I think the best way to handle Flash is to build ClickToFlash functionality directly into the browser.
By having a mass market share that makes it competitive. "HTML5" does not (by comparison).
And Flash Developers can now release their silly flash games on the iPhone/iOS App store.
If either of those facts were not true, you might have a point.
I don't think that's at all the case. Flash is mostly used for rich content on web pages. If it competes with anything, it's new browser features like HTML5. One could make the argument that Apple is trying to discourage the use of flash-based competitors to iTunes such as Amazon VOD and Hulu. Though that's a bit of a stretch.
It is no coincidence that flash gets dropped from the MBA at the same time that the app store for the Mac gets launched.
I think the coincidence is more mundane. According to Jobs, Apple made a more realistic battery benchmark for the Air. It now involves browsing 25 popular websites over wifi. Killing flash would almost certainly improve battery life in that benchmark.
I agree with your prediction, but I'm not sure it will be a good thing. With the exception of a few popular domains, I'd say 90% of flash content serves to annoy me and waste my computer's resources. I love using clicktoflash because it filters so much. Imagine if band websites started using HTML5 instead of flash. Instead of a big gray box with a "skip intro" link below it, you'd get bombarded with loud noises and stuff flashing on your screen.
I say this half-jokingly: How long until someone makes clicktoHTML5?
Although this doesn't solve the issue you raised, one change I would like to see made on the browser side is sandboxed tabs. As far as I know only Chrome is sandboxing tabs at the moment. I'd like to see Firefox and Safari do the same so one bad javascript doesn't kill the browser entirely.
One way those issues could be addressed is by Google page ranking. If certain abusive practices were highlighted as universally obnoxious, I'm sure Google could create filters to reduce the search ranking of those pages using obnoxious HTML5 and JS. My reasoning here is that the same executives and elements of corporate culture responsible for obnoxious uses of Flash and other technologies today are the same ones that push the hardest for SEO. At least at the HTML5 and JS level, Google could parse for obnoxious code, which AFAIK is something they can't do today with Flash. It's a bit of a stretch but certainly a possible solution.
Also embedded audio and gifs aren't covered by flash-blockers, though in some cases there isn't much of a difference between that and a video ad. If we have to filter content by type and/or by html tag instead of "wrapper that normally contains type", we'd get better coverage overall.
And as for 'more appropriate standards-based techniques', the phrase gives me the creeps.
We're living in an age of a range of wonderful languages, fantastic form markup languages, superb IDEs.
Apart from in web applications.
Languages? Javascript. One choice. And a very odd one at that. Markup? HTML. Yuck, no extensibility, barely updated for 10 years, way, way, way behind flash or xaml, it hasn't even got close to what's available to us on desktops yet. Javascript IDEs? None of any note that I've come across.
Wouldn't it be great if Chrome, Safari or Firefox added in python or ruby client-side support. Or all of them, really kill off IE...
It's a dire state of affairs, Microsoft are to blame, but I wouldn't celebrate 'standards-based' techniques. They're frustratingly constricting and old fashioned.
How can they not bear any responsibility for an implementation choice?
Choice is a wonderful thing, but take a look at how different the browsers are at implementing these basic, single languages. Imagine if you had to worry about cross browser support for another language. You might not just have to write your webpage to support IE6, but have to rewrite it in another language. It'd be great if we had multiple web languages, but it'd also be great if we had one single web language that actually worked 100% consistently cross platform.
Where things get dicey is when designers demand a high level of control over the cosmetics (i.e., pixel perfection) or developers demand a high level of control over the interactivity (i.e., making rich internet apps, etc.).
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with pixel perfect design or rich internet applications, but it is the desire to make the browser a design/media/application platform that created all these cross-browser issues.
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On a side note, sometimes I wonder if there would be more fat clients if Windows did not introduce DLL hell. DLL hell and app maintenance contributed to the enterprise market's desire for browser based applications.
If you take iOS for example, you see a lot of apps for site content that are native and richer than a browser, but still rely heavily on http. That model seems to be thriving.
I wonder if they've made a judgement that the basic installs of OS X will be like iOS and not contain 3rd party software that they can't control.
Oh, as the article notes, Windows doesn't ship with Flash installed, either. Does this mean anything at all? No.
XP does. I don't know about Vista and 7.
Presumably some large percentage of Windows desktops and laptops are sold with Flash pre-installed.
Why Microsoft doesn't ship Windows with Flash anymore might have something to do with the fact that they're trying to push Silverlight (even though that's not a standard install either).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight#Relationship_to_exi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player "Two years later it shipped with all releases of Windows XP."
https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms06-020... "Vulnerable versions of Macromedia Flash Player from Adobe are included with Windows XP"
Flash is 3rd party add-on.
It doesn't perform wonderful and has some issues. More users are using Apple products and have noticed it's not the best experience.
It has been stated and somewhat emphasized by Apple and the media to the general public that HTML5 embedded video is the future. See for example: http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/
The way I see it this is just your typical forward looking / future innovation push move by Apple.
Seems like a good reason not to ship it with the OS.
Unfortunately, I can't edit the title.
This comes at about the same time that Apple deprecates Oracle's Java from OS X. Is this a general move against preinstalling third party libraries or unrelated?
Perhaps it signals Apple's belief that both technologies are moribund, if not dying outright.
Perhaps it stems from Apple's claim that Flash is bad for battery life. This can matter even when there aren't obvious Flash widgets on pages you visit. Flash is used for ads and any number of tracking processes.
As much as some will love to pour hate on Apple for this move I think the real failure here belongs to Adobe who has been satisfied to sit on their laurels blaming Apple for victimizing them rather than delivering a compelling Flash experience on mobile devices or OS X (3+ years after the iPhone's release only now is full Flash running on mobile (Android) devices and reports are mixed on the experience).
That isn't what they are doing at all. You read whatever you read incorrectly. Apple is deprecating their own version of Java on OSX.
Isn't it also the only version of Java known to run reliably on OSX?
Oracle might try to remedy this situation eventually, but my bet is that it will be too little, too late.
If not Oracle, then the OpenJDK community. Either way, if it's wanted badly enough, it will happen.
The long-shot bet would be an LLVM/VMKit implementation that is clean of Sun code.
I'm writing this on an MBP and might well post from a Macbook Air someday but I think Hacker News is giving Apple a very non-Hackerlike treatment. They're clearly moving their computers to a much more controlled iPhone/iPad model.
If that's true, it still doesn't help mot users. I would guess that most users will install Flash pretty quickly after getting their laptop. They will then be subject to flash on all webpages, negating any battery savings.
Supporting multiple similar runtimes (HTML+JavaScript vs Flash vs Java vs SilverLight vs somebody else's kitchen sink) may make sense, but eats disk space, and, once people start using them, RAM and CPU bandwidth (due to less sharing of code between programs).
Including Flash and Java made sense a couple of years ago on the Mac, but when designing the iPhone, Apple, as they always do, revisited earlier decisions, and decided they should go. Given RAM constraints, I can see why.
On these new MacBooks, I guess Flash was dropped not because of RAM constraints, but because the disk is relatively small. It is but a tiny part of that 64 GB, but they probably must make many small cuts to give the user as much space as possible for his own stuff.
How about support costs. If Apple doesn't supply it, and you install it, then have problems, who ya gonna call ?
I'd say, call Adobe. Let their support call numbers spike off the chart.
Adobe needs product leaders that care. I think Apple is not so subtly trying to send them that message.
What they really should do is ship with both flash and Click-To-Flash. That would be serving the users best.
Adobe wouldn't do it, because a large majority of their customers build annoying flash ads.