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Comment by tjogin | Hacker News Reader

Adobe can't even make a performant flash plugin for Mac OS X or Linux, why on god's green earth would it be any different for lesser hardware?

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Apple won't let Adobe make a decent Flash plugin for OS X. Apple restricts APIs that the plugin needs to run well--things like access to hardware video acceleration.

A lot of people at Adobe use Macs. A lot of people at Adobe work on Flash player. They don't just sit around screwing off all day; Flash on OS X is lousy but there isn't much they can do about it.

I don't know why Apple does it. Stability? Stubbornness? You're right though. If Apple won't let Flash player work well on OS X, they sure as hell aren't going to let it run on iPhone.

Please explain how OpenCL fits in with that idea.

What Adobe probably means by "restricting tech" is that Apple does not allow alternative code interpreters on their device, as to not facilitate AppStore circumvention.

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote...

Mhm. "We don't want your OpenGL/DirectX, we will interface directly with your video adapter, crashing your OS. We're just that sort of a lovely bunch of hardcore uni-core supporters."

http://gizmodo.com/5407204/benchmarked-the-quad+core-i7-imac...

> I think Xbench, which hasn't been updated in years, is a solid benchmark for that old program that you depend on but has been long abandoned or at least ignored by its developer.

Quake Live runs pretty well as a browser plugin on OS X. Is Flash that much more complicated?

I don't believe that for a second. It sure doesn't explain why Flash isn't performant on Linux, or are you going to blame that on Linus Torvalds?

Linus won't let Adobe make a decent Flash plugin for Linux. Linus restricts APIs that the plugin needs to run well--things like access to hardware video acceleration.

I don't think Adobe cares much about people on Linux. There isn't much market there.

With actual GPU-accelerated H.264 decoding I’m guessing those CPU utilization numbers could drop to a remotely reasonable value. But it’s up to Apple to expose the appropriate hooks to allow Adobe to (eventually) enable that functionality.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678&p=5

See this Adobe PDF for an explanation about Linux: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote...

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