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Comment by j_baker | Hacker News Reader

I admit to being idealistic and closed-minded about AIR and Flash, but that's 84 million too many in my opinion.

I want Flash to die.

I've been a Flash developer for the last five years. I know it inside and out, and I've pushed ActionScript to its limits. It's a great environment for web-based, interaction-heavy software, and there's nothing else I'd be able to use instead of it for the sort of work I do.

But I want it to die.

I can't run a SWF without my MacBook Pro's fans kicking on after 30 seconds, and my battery life dropping to 1/4 of whatever it was.

It's a dastardly circumstance, because there are some things you can do with Flash that are prohibitively difficult to do with other tools. JS/HTML/CSS are getting close, but they're not quite ready yet.

I'm not really a Flash developer so I have to ask: Is the only issue you see with Flash that it runs poorly on Macs/Linux?

If this is, in fact, the reason that many people hate Flash then Adobe is really dropping the ball by not making this performance issue their highest priority.

Flash runs poorly on everything, in addition it's sucks battery power like crazy and the language itself is bad.

Compare it to the jvm which has been optimized for a decade and a half.

But they shouldn't fix it, because it is unfixable. The underlying architecture of the flash language means that performance on an arm processor will always be poor.

In summary flash needs to die in a pit of fire and molten brimstone.

What's wrong with the underlying architecture of Flash that makes it poor on Arm?

(First sorry for the incoherent rambling above, it made sense when I wrote it)

The flash machine architecture (at least last time I read about it, about a year ago) was based on a stack architecture, which is pretty okay on an x86 but doesn't work very well on an ARM processor primarily because it is optimized for register use (and has a lot more registers than is normally used in x86).

See also this question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2719469/why-is-the-jvm-st...] on stack overflow.

I get flash, but what's wrong with AIR?

AIR apps don't feel right. In the way that, for many, the subliminal feeling is what differentiates good iOS apps from everything else, AIR apps feel weird. All of them.

Call me crazy. But the fact is, there's another layer between the program's code and the OS. That layer is going to introduce some of its own character into the app, when compared to native apps for the current platform. I think that AIR's particular "character" is most unwelcome.

AIR apps don't feel right. In the way that, for many, the subliminal feeling is what differentiates good iOS apps from everything else, AIR apps feel weird. All of them

So do feel the same about every web app? Because Air is basically just webkit with some prepackaged APIs.

The difference being that web apps are supposed to be foreign. AIR is kind of like a weird stepfather who tries too hard to become a part of your life like your real father (native apps), despite the fact that he can never take his place. Web apps are like that cousin that, despite having little in common, you always have a good time whenever you visit them.

Almost. Web apps and native apps are very different beasts, and AIR makes a noble attempt to bridge the gap. The difference is that users expect web apps to act like web apps; a little bit of latency between input and visual feedback has always been the status quo (and it's getting much better). Native apps are supposed to react instantaneously, and behave consistently, and respect certain OS-wide UI conventions, accessibility features, and so forth. If the app stutters when being resized, or if there are lags in the interaction, semi-savvy users will assume that the app is poorly coded while the non-technical will be less satisfied without the ability to understand or express why.

I get what you're saying - but I have doubts about whether non-technical users care enough about those differences, glaring though they may be.

On the other hand, I guess non-technical users don't even have a concept of 'web apps'. They're just web sites which provide some useful service.

You might toss this off as the "buzz" factor, but a possible indicator of layman-users being affected by these subtle frustrations is the surging number of average users switching to the Mac.

And besides, everyone can see lag. My dad uses that term correctly, and he can't even tell the difference between "email" and "outlook".

It's made by Adobe and is associated with Flash, therefore it must be disliked.

In all seriousness, if you take out the Flash integration in Air (which I presume they would have to to make it work on iOS devices) then Air is basically like PhoneGap with a nice set of javascript APIs.

Air wraps flash which is why the grooveshark client takes 30 of my cpu (or used to do).

But the main problem is that the apps will never be well integrated into the host system. This doesn't matter for games but it does matter for almost any other app.

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