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Comment by zacharyvoase | Hacker News Reader

Wow. A tip to anyone reading this: if you ever find yourself explaining away poor—nay, pathological—performance with anything other than ‘we made some mistakes in the past and we’re doing what we can to correct them’, please take a good hard look at yourself and consider exiting the software industry. That’s all I have to say.

Edit: that wasn’t all I had to say.

> What about Mac? I’m not sure but my Mac colleagues have mentioned something about Apple not making their hardware decoding APIs available to applications

Well why didn’t you just go ahead and ask them before writing a blog post on company letterhead?! Is the corporate structure here so screwed up that you can’t actually do that, or are you just lazy?

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Doubly so if your product crashes even half as often as Flash. That they cannot seem to code for stability doesn't give me any confidence in their ability to code for speed.

I heard that they refused to work with Apple to improve its performance on Mac, and that was a core reason why they got excluded from the iOS platform -- searching for this I came up with an explanation directly from Apple:

"Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash."

You must have heard wrong, and it's the other way around.

Apple did not open their video acceleration APIs until they released OS X 10.6.3 circla mid-2010.

http://xbmc.org/davilla/2010/05/03/osx-gets-h-264-accellerat...

If that's the major reason preventing them from being performant, then I misunderstood the reason for crashing and the reason for poor performance to be the same. Apple should not be complaining about CPU usage.

That doesn't excuse Adobe from making buggy plugins.

Indeed the flash plugin has been riddled with crashers and security vulnerabilities. But the blame for high CPU usage during video decoding seems to have been mostly in Apple's court before that.

With Mountain Lion 10.8 Flash is still the same like before those APIs were released. I think Adobe just don't cares about it. I really I can't the strategy behind it. Flash at its best times was nearly on every PC and Mac why is that they didn't want to improve the quality of their app.

I don't want to listen (to customers and developers) you need to feel it.

Even without that API 10.6.2 and before video players still used a lot less CPU when decoding video.

Worse yet, nothing stops flash from working in the YUV color space when mixing video and non video elements.

> That they cannot seem to code for stability doesn't give me any confidence in their ability to code for speed.

Much more importantly, it doesn't give me any confidence in their ability to code for security.

That quote is a great piece of PR. The number one reason quoted from that Symantec report was: "Microsoft Windows SMB Remote Code Execution". It also didn't have anything to do with what makes Macs crash, it was a report on vulnerability per plat, it mentioned flash in cross site exploits, not flash by itself. But to this day and for a long time the music keeps playing.

Here is a good analysis of that text that explains a lot on how that statement is great PR but nothing more: http://truegryc.blogspot.pt/2010/05/response-to-thoughts-on-...

> What about Mac?

This is a two and a half year old blog post. Mac hardware video decoding is supported now.

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