Adobe Acknowledges Flash Problem in Chrome Notebooks | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Acknowledges Flash Problem in Chrome Notebooks

thechromesource.com

17 pointsdcawrey25 comments

Sometimes I get the feeling that the Flash codebase is probably a huge clusterfuck. You know these doomed projects, that were never properly written at the beginning and then more and more stuff gets added on top of it. Then you change developers and even more stuff gets added. Instead of rewritting the whole mess, you do silly things like trying to port it to 64bit. At the end you got some completly ridiculous binary, that went through several dozen QA cycles and appears to be somewhat stable, but nobody really know why its actually working anymore.

The Flash VM used for Actionscript 3 (AVM2) is supposedly a total rewrite from Flash 8, so theoretically most of the codebase is pretty recent.

Its funny a lot of people see flash as a way to address platform fragmentation, but its starting to become a cause of it.

Interestingly Adobe have rewritten large parts of Creative Suite in AIR (AS3) to allow greater cross platform code sharing, especially for UI code. I believe this is one of the reasons that they have been able to bring Adobe Audition to Mac OS. The important difference here is that none of the Creative Suite applications are intended for low power/low performance devices.

It's the constant flow of 0-days that makes me convinced - yes, I don't doubt it's a clusterfuck. I've heard rather damning things about the photoshop codebase as well (several years ago) - it seems likely to me that there is some kind of systemic problem at adobe.

Seems like issue here is more of a flash code which is optimized for windows(aka other netbooks) vs flash code on linux and multi process architecture they have in chrome.

you know, I've heard people say this a few time over the years, and although it doesn't make it more true, it does sound very plausible.

I don't know if there's a better thread for this, but 2010 sure hasn't been Adobe's year.

Yeah, and as someone who spends a large portion of my time developing Flex (so I'm biased for instead of against these technologies) my fear is that they don't seem to care/understand how bad of a year it has been. Flash 10 was released more than 2 years ago, and as far as I can tell Flash 11 is a year away even if all goes well, and the focus is on 3d graphics and shiny stuff. Meanwhile they desperately need to release a 10.2 that improves performance, has a reasonable settings interface, and integrates more fully with the browser.

To be fair, at the time I thought Air was a great idea and even flirted with learning AS and focussing a not-insignificant amount of time accounting for it in my ideas. However, and I think HTML5 surprised everybody, the market has zigged where Adobe zagged. These transitions take ages to complete, but when companies like YouTube make their choices, people listen and many times follow suit. We'll see how they wiggle through the next few years, technologically, but they may be headed for a low-grade tragedy (see: Corel).

ADBE is down 23% this year. Reading their quarterly reports + other data they have been having a hard several years. Been (happily) shorting them for a while. http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/09/adobe-owns-web-an...

I would never personally bet a startup on adobe tech. Just too risky.

Disclaimer: This post is my own personal opinion and in no way reflects my employer.

What are the specific problems with Flash and YouTube on Cr48s?

The Atom N455 has integrated GMA 3150 video. So no hardware video acceleration with Flash 10.1. h264 video will play, but maybe not at full frame rate, and certainly not full screen. And forget about HD.

youtube could as well detect if you're running chrome os and use their HTML5 player instead of the Flash-based one. any idea why they don't do this by default on supported browsers? last time i checked, the HTML5 player was opt-in.

It's basically just not considered release-quality yet, as far as I know. The Flash player is mature and YouTube has been fine with it for a long time.

I am not sure but I think they can't show ads in HTML5 version of the player - thats why they have it as opt-in, I might be wrong.

But what the hell Adobe.. for every new device that flash runs, they need 2-3 years to optimize it. Flash needs to die!!

They've been able to start making some money from YouTube ads in-video, and it seems like they scaled back their whole HTML5 effort for YouTube after that... Then they decided to integrate Flash into Chrome, which I'm sure played a part in the decision.

I may be wrong, but I'm under the impression that only a small portion of the total video base has been converted to a <video> friendly format.

This is not true. The majority of any online video sites (YouTube, Vimeo, etc) use h.264-encoded MP4 delivered to a Flash player on the client-side. So the video is ready to be put in <video> tag, at least in browsers supporting h.264 (sorry Firefox).

If you use the YouTube5 plugin for Safari to browser YouTube you will know this.

The problem is they currently have no way to insert ads and other stuff (like subtitles) into video if it is not played in Flash.

I thought one advantage of <video> is that regular HTML can be used to display content like ads?

Two issues:

* Then it's easier to block by AdBlock

* Advanced sync'ing between ads and video (required for many ads and features like subtitles) is not possible in HTML5

Why not? There's timing events and etc that should operate at a high enough resolution for any such syncing.

Interesting. I must have missed the timeupdate events.

Seems someone has already implemented a nice player with sync'ing subtitles and slides: http://johndyer.name/post/HTML5-Video-Player-with-Slides-and...

This is cool! Thanks for the update!

From the article: "Adobe’s senior director for engineering Paul Betlam took to their corporate blog and declared Flash 10.1 support on Chrome OS notebooks 'a work in progress'."

A work in progress. Just like on my macbook, except they've had what -- a decade to work on that? : rolleyes :

For a long time Adobe got away with its broken clients on non-Windows platforms because the majority of Windows users were happy with a decent implementation. And the developers of websites followed the market.

Now it backfires when suddenly lots of non-Windows platforms grow in popularity and Adobe has no immediate solutions to address the performance and stability issues. I guess when it realized this would be a big deal, it was already too late.

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