This is likely because of Microsoft and little to do with Apple. If Adobe simply are not allowed to run Flash on major mobile OS's then they have very little choice but to do this.
Metro's IE version in Windows 8 will not allow any plugins, so no Flash support. The user could always switch the the desktop on these devices and then use any existing desktop browser with Flash support but this isn't at all ideal on a tablet. The desktop wont work so well with touch and MS want people using Metro all the time on tablets. I'm sure Win 8 tablets will end up selling millions as a full OS on a tablet will finally make these things useful and not pointless toys.
The perofrmance of Flash is obviously better than HTML5 though, so are it's capabilities for gaming. Since Flash Player 10.2 "stage Video" feature it has the best in class video performance with the lowest CPU load compared anything else out there (but the video player itself has to enable the feature). Theres also tons of videos on youtube demonatrating the iFad being crippled by extremely simple HTML5 animations while Flash is running complex games at 60FPS and even doing this on slower Android devices.
"The perofrmance of Flash is obviously better than HTML5 though, so are it's capabilities for gaming. Since Flash Player 10.2 "stage Video" feature it has the best in class video performance with the lowest CPU load compared anything else out there (but the video player itself has to enable the feature)."
A large part of the complaint regarding Flash has to do with its extraordinarily expensive IDLE TIME costs. This is what makes it slow down web pages (with ads and what-not) on mobile (and desktops)
All the whining in the world about how great their video capabilities are is not going to change this --- it simply reinforces the fact that Adobe and their supporters would rather complain about non-existent issues than deal with the complaints of the real world. It's like I keep telling you your code uses too much damn memory, and you constantly reply by ignoring that and telling me how it does a great job of using multiple threads --- maybe true, but irrelevant.
Well, as of today, Adobe has moved into the real world camp --- but some of their supporters appear unwilling to follow them.
Why did Epic recently port their latest unreal engine for Flash 11?. And Crytek is also interested in a similar endeavor. Not sure how Epic could have ported their latest jewel to the "humble" HTML5.
Look, if there's nothing to be redrawn, the Flash Player will not consume CPU cycles. Where did you hear that it would do so? Flash can also change its framerate dynamically if needed.
For heavier stuff Flash Player can render much more visual content than web browsers. I have tested this myself. JS animations are basically slow and bloated.
I wonder why people won't whine about poor performance of jquery etc. in every browser related news article? Obviously same level of performance should be required from HTML5 ;)
If you read the article, it says that Adobe will focus to AIR as platform for Flash content in mobile.
"This is likely because of Microsoft and little to do with Apple."
There are hundreds of millions of iOS devices and every video site has been delivering non-Flash video to them for almost four years, long before Metro was announced to be HTML5 only. Even live video streaming from TwitchTV and MLG are working on iOS at this point.
Once again, your fanboy reality distortion shows.
Either way, good on Microsoft for doing the right thing. Flash was already on the way out for years, it was a solution for problems that were being solved by HTML5 and AJAX, and now that video (aside from DRM) is taken care of there is little reason anymore for it.
Power inefficient and one of the few vectors for malware on Windows, glad to see it go.
"This decision is due at least in part to Apple's refusal to allow Flash on iOS"
Surely this sped up the process, but this was inevitable. Even today, nearing the end of 2011, Adobe has had trouble bringing a good version of Flash to all other mobile platforms even if you exclude iOS.
If I wanted to be snarky, I'd say that Adobe has had trouble bringing a good version of Flash *anywhere*, but that's not entirely fair of me... I've mostly been fine with it on the PC/Mac since GPU acceleration came in 10.1.
Flash's biggest sin has been how behind the times it has been for the last few years - things like GPU acceleration, 64-bit support, and more have come only in the last couple of years as a response to competitive pressure, and it's definitely too little too late from my perspective.
As compared to what? If you think about multimedia and games for web, there's really no better alternative than Flash.
HTML5 in its current state is a big joke compared to what Flash allows. For animation, HTML5 can basically do few fancy jquery effects and thats it. Rendering of multiple graphics objects sucks in speed compared to Flash. Javascript animations consumes much more cpu resources than Flash Player so what was the point?
How about live Web casting, or advanced graphics effects that Flash can do in real time with Stage3D or Pixel Bender? Sound effects?
The biggest problem if that there's no proper tools for designers to do multimedia content for HTML5. When Adobe releases HTML5 exporter for Flash IDE that may change.
From the past experience I suggest that "cross browser" and "cross platform" will be another weak point for HTML5. There'll will be tricky times ahead for web developers trying to cope with different browser versions with different set of features. Its too diverse platform and limited in features.
Don't forget about Silverlight. As Andrew notes "competitive pressure" directly from MS (I assume he meant Silverlight) was a huge boost to setting a fire under Adobe to better Flash. The problem is it was a too little too late.
I think Flash will eventually fall completely out of favour with Adobe as the most common use seems to be for video, which seems to be better served by HTML5 video tags. I predict Flash will eventually become an open source project.
Testing to see how the mark up works: italics <i>italics</i>
For gaming, there are also things like the Unity Web Player to consider: http://unity3d.com/
For everything else, you're mostly correct in that Flash is best equipped for doing many of these things right now on PCs, but HTML5 is only gaining momentum - I'm sure that many of these things will be implemented in some fashion going forward, as long as there's demand for them. Plug-ins are on their way out.
I bet the day HTML will get same feature set as Flash today will likely be 5-10 years away. And do you mean creating another set plugins for doing stuff that allready can be done with Flash that's found on 99% of desktop computers? OMG how practical.
Silverlight is mostly forgotten for serious multimedia stuff. It too lacks content creation tools and features.
Adobe says its focusing on Adobe AIR for mobile devices. That essentially means that Flash content will be released as RIA apps on mobile. You might actually be using an app that was created with Flash IDE or Builder.
I think the differences in perspective on this one tend to come down to Flash user vs. Flash developer. You have to admit that the vast majority of uses of Flash on the internet could easily be replaced by HTML5, and this is where those of us who are annoyed by it run in to it most. If it's not a game or something using 3D it probably doesn't need to be in Flash these days. Those parts are being worked on heavily as well, all major browsers have some form of 2D acceleration and most are working on support for WebGL 3D (though that has significant security implications at the moment).
I look at Flash and plugins in general more as a last resort. If you can't do it in the browser then sure, go that route. If you can however, just do it that way. Now that mobile browsers are actually significant to many sites, that's even more true, as the limited RAM and to some extent CPU combined with scaling the page to fit the screen means plugin performance is generally horrible.
It's about time. The video was viewed on the wall, so to speak.
Apple has been successful in banning this, and as always, where Apple goes, Microsoft follows. Between the two of them, Adobe had no choice..
Interesting that in all the layoffs announced by Adobe, there were a lot from the enterprise development unit. I wonder what that means?
And of course, Microsoft is banning Silverlight from WP7 and Metro witheir their Apple-like plugin ban. Apparently, no more development after the just finished version 5.
I'm so glad they gave up. I actually uninstalled the Adobe Flash plugin on my Motorola Droid. It was consuming 12 MB of space (~5% of my app storage) and all it did was bring web page rendering to a screeching halt whenever there were flash items on it. I don't recall ever intentionally interacting with any flash item on a web page. Maybe once or twice I was able to view a webpage that an iOS device couldn't view.
Steve Jobs was right that Flash on phones led to a generally poorer user experience. Still, I'm glad we had the choice to have the plug-in installed on Android. Maybe the experience was better on more powerful phones (the Droid's SoC is weaksauce, even OC'd to 900 MHz and running GB 2.3.7)
Adobe doesn't make money off the Flash runtime. Not the desktop runtime, anyhow. They make money off the tools. They charge $800 for "Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP Premium Edition", and the cheapest of their tools is still in the hundreds of dollars.
From Adobe's perspective, it shouldn't matter what the runtime is.
They don't make money off of the runtime, but if you make the runtime and then get it on enough computers, it increases your reach, which increases the platform's appeal to developers, which sells the tools that actually DO make money. If you control both the runtime and the dev tools, you can guarantee that your dev tools are better positioned to take advantage of the runtime's new features, which can keep developers from spending their dollars elsewhere.
Adobe will likely continue to make money if they can put good HTML5 development tools out there, but it's hard to see this as anything but a loss for them.
Agreed, controlling the runtime was a competitive advantage for Adobe, that's gone now with mobile at least.
Is Adobe going to fight two battle fronts by pushing Flash on the desktop and HTML5 on mobile? I can't see how flash survives long term on the desktop now that they've conceded the mobile market.
"This decision is due at least in part to Apple's refusal to allow Flash on iOS, making HTML5 the de-facto standard for developers wishing to target the highest number of platforms possible with the least amount of development effort."
Uhh, it's due to Adobe's CONSTANT AND ON-GOING ability to ever get Flash to run properly on mobile devices. Apple didn't get pissy about this just because they hate Adobe. Every damn Android review I read includes some line about either "battery life sucked when Flash was enabled" and/or "jerkiness when Flash was enabled". They've had four years to work on this (not to mention the years of complaining about Flash BEFORE iPhone shipped) and they appear to have been completely incapable of using that time constructively.
Adobe seems to take optimization seriously in Photoshop --- and NOWHERE else. To take another example, Acrobat for Mac constantly sucked, without even the most basic caching in place, until OSX made it irrelevant.
That comment alone is why Flash is still relevant. Complain all you want about Flash (and I will complain with you), the simple truth is that every single browser will have its' own "implementation" of HTML5.
I've developed Flash-sites for the last ten years now, and I can only say, that it's total crap.
The people claiming, that flash runs smooth and fast apparently don't know what they're talking about. Yes, FlashPlayer has improved over time, and the addition of GPU-acceleration in 10.1 was heavily needed for videos, but still Flash doesn't perform very good.
Flash is good for stuff that noone needs, i.e. crappy games, annoying animated graphics and all this.
Websites don't need animations and they need to run on every machine without any plugins! We don't need games that can be played in the browser aswell, if you wanna play games, then install one or buy a console, etc. And video? Well... how about using another container instead of FLV? Try MP4 or OGV which can be played in HTML5 or simply by just passing the link of the video to your favourite mediaplayer, which then gives full GPU-acceleration aswell.
I'm actually glad that Flash is dying off, as I need to create the websites for my customers to run without plugins anyways, so that everyone can browse them. One problem less to think about.
In a real life for similar multimedia content Flash beats HTML5 easily on graphics rendering. If you have problems with coding, then its not others fault.
As a multimedia platform it is much easier to develop and debug advanced content than with CSS3/HTML5 and horrible adhoc JS-libraries which won't work in every browser anyway. No proper tools and lack of any advanced features means going back to stone age.
You got it totally wrong, that's not what he meant. He's saying that instead of using FLV which isn't supported by HTML5, why not using some other container which is.
I don't know about games and graphics, etc. but I'd really like to see videos being handled by the browsers themselves and not a plug-in, just like pictures.
Sure, but I don't see it happening given the competetion between browser makers. They can't ever agree which is the right format to support. Given the "pace" of development with HTML5 that's not surprising.
Lack of streaming and other advanced features like content protection makes it unattractive for commercial use.
Yes, that's very annoying. For example, the most prominent streaming video codec is h.264 but only two browsers support it, IE 9 and safari. Chrome did support it at first, but then google introduced that stupid VP8 coded and removed the h.264 support from chrome. Opera and firefox don't support it either.
Imagine if a browser doesn't support a popular image format, like jpeg. Wouldn't that be stupid.
Still, HTML5 might not be ready yet, but it doesn't mean that it should be abandoned. With proper work it can become better than flash, at least for video purposes.
Support for h.264 was pulled and omitted in browsers that didn't want to pay the licensing fees. Later, on August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged for royalties. All other royalties will remain in place such as the royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video. So consumers on free video won't get charged per video, but it costs money to make them, and potentially for video that isn't free, which is the video that most people want (Netflix, Hulu, etc). The point is that MPEG LA had nearly pushed h.264... a proprietary and costly format, on everyone, including into HTML5, which is supposed to be a free and open standard. Dodged a bullet there if you ask me.
Chrome moved to license free WebM and Ogg, and continues to support Flash (it's integrated into Chromium). At least Flash didn't push fees on anyone using that technology.
"Lack of streaming and other advanced features like content protection makes it unattractive for commercial use."
DRM is one major drawback to HTML5 video, one that is currently handled by apps. Live streaming was tackled ages ago, I can watch live MLG streams through the mobile iOS browser no problem.
I'm not a fanboy at all actually and I don't have problems with coding Flash itself, but I don't see any reason for having to code a website in two versions, when it's perfectly doable without Flash aswell.
That's what I'm talking about.
And, if Flash wouldn't be a bug-ridden and publicly known rather unsecure PlugIn, but a piece of the browser-engine itself, which gets updated frequently, running flawlessly etc, then I'd have not any problems with it at all.
Oh, and having to buy a software to make any Flash-content doesn't help either.
So yeah, I stand by my POV, that for a professional web-developer Flash is not really enjoyable so far, allthough it offers some great features.
You must have been living under a rock. Flash is updated at much higher pace than HTML5 can ever do. There has been very frequent updates so your claim is false and obviously driven by an agenda.
Latest public beta has multithreaded H.264 decoding which makes video acceleration even further.
For a basic web site HTML is the right thing but I'm talking about advanced multimedia content for games, marketing, education or art. HTML5 just don't have the features or the tools to cut it.
HTML was never meant to be multimedia standard, and its development has always been stagnated by browser wars, slow moving organizations and some individuals who doesn't have a clue or are driven by personal interests. Sorry to be blunt but thats the way I see it.
Flash on mobile phones is horrible. It slows down the whole browsing experience and consumes too much power. Flash's main purpose on mobile phones is for playing videos. HTML5 can easily handle that task and would bring video playback capability to a much wider range of mobile OSes, like WP, iOS, symbian, and mobile browsers, like opera mobile.
As I recall, Apple were trying to patent some very core elements of the HTML 5 standard. Patent 7,743,336 and patent (applied) 20070101146. That was a big fly in the W3C's ointment as apple refused (at the time) to consider complying with the royalty free standards of the consortium. Has this now been worked out so that the HTML 5 standard won't become a loaded gun pointed at any body but Apple?
I thought at the time that it was typical of Jobs to try to get a 'standard' for the web that he, and only he, controlled....
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40 Comments
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teng029 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
This sh*t just got serious...B3an - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
This is likely because of Microsoft and little to do with Apple. If Adobe simply are not allowed to run Flash on major mobile OS's then they have very little choice but to do this.Metro's IE version in Windows 8 will not allow any plugins, so no Flash support. The user could always switch the the desktop on these devices and then use any existing desktop browser with Flash support but this isn't at all ideal on a tablet. The desktop wont work so well with touch and MS want people using Metro all the time on tablets. I'm sure Win 8 tablets will end up selling millions as a full OS on a tablet will finally make these things useful and not pointless toys.
The perofrmance of Flash is obviously better than HTML5 though, so are it's capabilities for gaming. Since Flash Player 10.2 "stage Video" feature it has the best in class video performance with the lowest CPU load compared anything else out there (but the video player itself has to enable the feature). Theres also tons of videos on youtube demonatrating the iFad being crippled by extremely simple HTML5 animations while Flash is running complex games at 60FPS and even doing this on slower Android devices.
name99 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
"The perofrmance of Flash is obviously better than HTML5 though, so are it's capabilities for gaming. Since Flash Player 10.2 "stage Video" feature it has the best in class video performance with the lowest CPU load compared anything else out there (but the video player itself has to enable the feature)."A large part of the complaint regarding Flash has to do with its extraordinarily expensive IDLE TIME costs. This is what makes it slow down web pages (with ads and what-not) on mobile (and desktops)
All the whining in the world about how great their video capabilities are is not going to change this --- it simply reinforces the fact that Adobe and their supporters would rather complain about non-existent issues than deal with the complaints of the real world. It's like I keep telling you your code uses too much damn memory, and you constantly reply by ignoring that and telling me how it does a great job of using multiple threads --- maybe true, but irrelevant.
Well, as of today, Adobe has moved into the real world camp --- but some of their supporters appear unwilling to follow them.
ananduser - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Why did Epic recently port their latest unreal engine for Flash 11?. And Crytek is also interested in a similar endeavor. Not sure how Epic could have ported their latest jewel to the "humble" HTML5.DarkShift - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Look, if there's nothing to be redrawn, the Flash Player will not consume CPU cycles. Where did you hear that it would do so? Flash can also change its framerate dynamically if needed.For heavier stuff Flash Player can render much more visual content than web browsers. I have tested this myself. JS animations are basically slow and bloated.
I wonder why people won't whine about poor performance of jquery etc. in every browser related news article? Obviously same level of performance should be required from HTML5 ;)
If you read the article, it says that Adobe will focus to AIR as platform for Flash content in mobile.
KoolAidMan1 - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
"This is likely because of Microsoft and little to do with Apple."There are hundreds of millions of iOS devices and every video site has been delivering non-Flash video to them for almost four years, long before Metro was announced to be HTML5 only. Even live video streaming from TwitchTV and MLG are working on iOS at this point.
Once again, your fanboy reality distortion shows.
Either way, good on Microsoft for doing the right thing. Flash was already on the way out for years, it was a solution for problems that were being solved by HTML5 and AJAX, and now that video (aside from DRM) is taken care of there is little reason anymore for it.
Power inefficient and one of the few vectors for malware on Windows, glad to see it go.
solipsism - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
"This decision is due at least in part to Apple's refusal to allow Flash on iOS"Surely this sped up the process, but this was inevitable. Even today, nearing the end of 2011, Adobe has had trouble bringing a good version of Flash to all other mobile platforms even if you exclude iOS.
tipoo - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Why does your title always say your name? And are you the same guy from Appleinsider?/offtopic
solipsism - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
The Subject issue appears to be an artifact of using my 1Password setup. I'll look into that.Yes.
Andrew.a.cunningham - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
If I wanted to be snarky, I'd say that Adobe has had trouble bringing a good version of Flash *anywhere*, but that's not entirely fair of me... I've mostly been fine with it on the PC/Mac since GPU acceleration came in 10.1.Flash's biggest sin has been how behind the times it has been for the last few years - things like GPU acceleration, 64-bit support, and more have come only in the last couple of years as a response to competitive pressure, and it's definitely too little too late from my perspective.
DarkShift - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
As compared to what? If you think about multimedia and games for web, there's really no better alternative than Flash.HTML5 in its current state is a big joke compared to what Flash allows. For animation, HTML5 can basically do few fancy jquery effects and thats it. Rendering of multiple graphics objects sucks in speed compared to Flash. Javascript animations consumes much more cpu resources than Flash Player so what was the point?
How about live Web casting, or advanced graphics effects that Flash can do in real time with Stage3D or Pixel Bender? Sound effects?
The biggest problem if that there's no proper tools for designers to do multimedia content for HTML5. When Adobe releases HTML5 exporter for Flash IDE that may change.
From the past experience I suggest that "cross browser" and "cross platform" will be another weak point for HTML5. There'll will be tricky times ahead for web developers trying to cope with different browser versions with different set of features. Its too diverse platform and limited in features.
solipsism - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Don't forget about Silverlight. As Andrew notes "competitive pressure" directly from MS (I assume he meant Silverlight) was a huge boost to setting a fire under Adobe to better Flash. The problem is it was a too little too late.I think Flash will eventually fall completely out of favour with Adobe as the most common use seems to be for video, which seems to be better served by HTML5 video tags. I predict Flash will eventually become an open source project.
Testing to see how the mark up works:
italics
<i>italics</i>
Andrew.a.cunningham - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
For gaming, there are also things like the Unity Web Player to consider: http://unity3d.com/For everything else, you're mostly correct in that Flash is best equipped for doing many of these things right now on PCs, but HTML5 is only gaining momentum - I'm sure that many of these things will be implemented in some fashion going forward, as long as there's demand for them. Plug-ins are on their way out.
DarkShift - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Yes I know, but its not very popular. You might have heard that Unity is in fact developing Flash Player 11 support because of that:http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flas...
I bet the day HTML will get same feature set as Flash today will likely be 5-10 years away. And do you mean creating another set plugins for doing stuff that allready can be done with Flash that's found on 99% of desktop computers? OMG how practical.
Silverlight is mostly forgotten for serious multimedia stuff. It too lacks content creation tools and features.
Adobe says its focusing on Adobe AIR for mobile devices. That essentially means that Flash content will be released as RIA apps on mobile. You might actually be using an app that was created with Flash IDE or Builder.
wolrah - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
I think the differences in perspective on this one tend to come down to Flash user vs. Flash developer. You have to admit that the vast majority of uses of Flash on the internet could easily be replaced by HTML5, and this is where those of us who are annoyed by it run in to it most. If it's not a game or something using 3D it probably doesn't need to be in Flash these days. Those parts are being worked on heavily as well, all major browsers have some form of 2D acceleration and most are working on support for WebGL 3D (though that has significant security implications at the moment).I look at Flash and plugins in general more as a last resort. If you can't do it in the browser then sure, go that route. If you can however, just do it that way. Now that mobile browsers are actually significant to many sites, that's even more true, as the limited RAM and to some extent CPU combined with scaling the page to fit the screen means plugin performance is generally horrible.
melgross - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
It's about time. The video was viewed on the wall, so to speak.Apple has been successful in banning this, and as always, where Apple goes, Microsoft follows. Between the two of them, Adobe had no choice..
Interesting that in all the layoffs announced by Adobe, there were a lot from the enterprise development unit. I wonder what that means?
And of course, Microsoft is banning Silverlight from WP7 and Metro witheir their Apple-like plugin ban. Apparently, no more development after the just finished version 5.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/11/09/micr...
ananduser - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
/offtopic Are you by any chance melgross the moderator of AppleInsider ?3DoubleD - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
I'm so glad they gave up. I actually uninstalled the Adobe Flash plugin on my Motorola Droid. It was consuming 12 MB of space (~5% of my app storage) and all it did was bring web page rendering to a screeching halt whenever there were flash items on it. I don't recall ever intentionally interacting with any flash item on a web page. Maybe once or twice I was able to view a webpage that an iOS device couldn't view.Steve Jobs was right that Flash on phones led to a generally poorer user experience. Still, I'm glad we had the choice to have the plug-in installed on Android. Maybe the experience was better on more powerful phones (the Droid's SoC is weaksauce, even OC'd to 900 MHz and running GB 2.3.7)
Guspaz - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Adobe doesn't make money off the Flash runtime. Not the desktop runtime, anyhow. They make money off the tools. They charge $800 for "Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP Premium Edition", and the cheapest of their tools is still in the hundreds of dollars.From Adobe's perspective, it shouldn't matter what the runtime is.
Andrew.a.cunningham - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
They don't make money off of the runtime, but if you make the runtime and then get it on enough computers, it increases your reach, which increases the platform's appeal to developers, which sells the tools that actually DO make money. If you control both the runtime and the dev tools, you can guarantee that your dev tools are better positioned to take advantage of the runtime's new features, which can keep developers from spending their dollars elsewhere.Adobe will likely continue to make money if they can put good HTML5 development tools out there, but it's hard to see this as anything but a loss for them.
iluvdeal - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Agreed, controlling the runtime was a competitive advantage for Adobe, that's gone now with mobile at least.Is Adobe going to fight two battle fronts by pushing Flash on the desktop and HTML5 on mobile? I can't see how flash survives long term on the desktop now that they've conceded the mobile market.
name99 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
"This decision is due at least in part to Apple's refusal to allow Flash on iOS, making HTML5 the de-facto standard for developers wishing to target the highest number of platforms possible with the least amount of development effort."Uhh, it's due to Adobe's CONSTANT AND ON-GOING ability to ever get Flash to run properly on mobile devices. Apple didn't get pissy about this just because they hate Adobe. Every damn Android review I read includes some line about either "battery life sucked when Flash was enabled" and/or "jerkiness when Flash was enabled".
They've had four years to work on this (not to mention the years of complaining about Flash BEFORE iPhone shipped) and they appear to have been completely incapable of using that time constructively.
Adobe seems to take optimization seriously in Photoshop --- and NOWHERE else. To take another example, Acrobat for Mac constantly sucked, without even the most basic caching in place, until OSX made it irrelevant.
Tanclearas - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
That comment alone is why Flash is still relevant. Complain all you want about Flash (and I will complain with you), the simple truth is that every single browser will have its' own "implementation" of HTML5.jrs77 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
I've developed Flash-sites for the last ten years now, and I can only say, that it's total crap.The people claiming, that flash runs smooth and fast apparently don't know what they're talking about. Yes, FlashPlayer has improved over time, and the addition of GPU-acceleration in 10.1 was heavily needed for videos, but still Flash doesn't perform very good.
Flash is good for stuff that noone needs, i.e. crappy games, annoying animated graphics and all this.
Websites don't need animations and they need to run on every machine without any plugins!
We don't need games that can be played in the browser aswell, if you wanna play games, then install one or buy a console, etc.
And video? Well... how about using another container instead of FLV? Try MP4 or OGV which can be played in HTML5 or simply by just passing the link of the video to your favourite mediaplayer, which then gives full GPU-acceleration aswell.
I'm actually glad that Flash is dying off, as I need to create the websites for my customers to run without plugins anyways, so that everyone can browse them. One problem less to think about.
ananduser - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Epic Games disagrees with you, having ported their unreal engine to Flash 11.DarkShift - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Nice try fanboy.In a real life for similar multimedia content Flash beats HTML5 easily on graphics rendering. If you have problems with coding, then its not others fault.
As a multimedia platform it is much easier to develop and debug advanced content than with CSS3/HTML5 and horrible adhoc JS-libraries which won't work in every browser anyway. No proper tools and lack of any advanced features means going back to stone age.
DarkShift - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
And you obviously didn't know that Flash has supported MPEG4 H.264 since year 2006 :Deddman - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
You got it totally wrong, that's not what he meant. He's saying that instead of using FLV which isn't supported by HTML5, why not using some other container which is.I don't know about games and graphics, etc. but I'd really like to see videos being handled by the browsers themselves and not a plug-in, just like pictures.
DarkShift - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Sure, but I don't see it happening given the competetion between browser makers. They can't ever agree which is the right format to support. Given the "pace" of development with HTML5 that's not surprising.Lack of streaming and other advanced features like content protection makes it unattractive for commercial use.
eddman - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Yes, that's very annoying. For example, the most prominent streaming video codec is h.264 but only two browsers support it, IE 9 and safari. Chrome did support it at first, but then google introduced that stupid VP8 coded and removed the h.264 support from chrome. Opera and firefox don't support it either.Imagine if a browser doesn't support a popular image format, like jpeg. Wouldn't that be stupid.
Still, HTML5 might not be ready yet, but it doesn't mean that it should be abandoned. With proper work it can become better than flash, at least for video purposes.
jookyone - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
Support for h.264 was pulled and omitted in browsers that didn't want to pay the licensing fees. Later, on August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged for royalties. All other royalties will remain in place such as the royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video. So consumers on free video won't get charged per video, but it costs money to make them, and potentially for video that isn't free, which is the video that most people want (Netflix, Hulu, etc). The point is that MPEG LA had nearly pushed h.264... a proprietary and costly format, on everyone, including into HTML5, which is supposed to be a free and open standard. Dodged a bullet there if you ask me.Chrome moved to license free WebM and Ogg, and continues to support Flash (it's integrated into Chromium). At least Flash didn't push fees on anyone using that technology.
KoolAidMan1 - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
"Lack of streaming and other advanced features like content protection makes it unattractive for commercial use."DRM is one major drawback to HTML5 video, one that is currently handled by apps. Live streaming was tackled ages ago, I can watch live MLG streams through the mobile iOS browser no problem.
jrs77 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
I'm not a fanboy at all actually and I don't have problems with coding Flash itself, but I don't see any reason for having to code a website in two versions, when it's perfectly doable without Flash aswell.That's what I'm talking about.
And, if Flash wouldn't be a bug-ridden and publicly known rather unsecure PlugIn, but a piece of the browser-engine itself, which gets updated frequently, running flawlessly etc, then I'd have not any problems with it at all.
Oh, and having to buy a software to make any Flash-content doesn't help either.
So yeah, I stand by my POV, that for a professional web-developer Flash is not really enjoyable so far, allthough it offers some great features.
DarkShift - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
You must have been living under a rock. Flash is updated at much higher pace than HTML5 can ever do. There has been very frequent updates so your claim is false and obviously driven by an agenda.Just a remainder for what version 11 brings up:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/w...
Latest public beta has multithreaded H.264 decoding which makes video acceleration even further.
For a basic web site HTML is the right thing but I'm talking about advanced multimedia content for games, marketing, education or art. HTML5 just don't have the features or the tools to cut it.
HTML was never meant to be multimedia standard, and its development has always been stagnated by browser wars, slow moving organizations and some individuals who doesn't have a clue or are driven by personal interests. Sorry to be blunt but thats the way I see it.
KoolAidMan1 - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
"Nice try fanboy"You're calling a FLASH DEVELOPER a fanboy for not liking Flash?
My god the internet is stupid.
jookyone - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link
No one believes he is a Flash Developer, but rather a fanboy in disguise. Everything he says suggests he has never developed Flash.eddman - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Flash on mobile phones is horrible. It slows down the whole browsing experience and consumes too much power.Flash's main purpose on mobile phones is for playing videos. HTML5 can easily handle that task and would bring video playback capability to a much wider range of mobile OSes, like WP, iOS, symbian, and mobile browsers, like opera mobile.
croc - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
As I recall, Apple were trying to patent some very core elements of the HTML 5 standard. Patent 7,743,336 and patent (applied) 20070101146. That was a big fly in the W3C's ointment as apple refused (at the time) to consider complying with the royalty free standards of the consortium. Has this now been worked out so that the HTML 5 standard won't become a loaded gun pointed at any body but Apple?I thought at the time that it was typical of Jobs to try to get a 'standard' for the web that he, and only he, controlled....
windywoo - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
In Opera because it can be set to click to play. I thought I saw this feature in the default Android browser too.Performance on early devices wasn't great but on phones with an 800 mhz processor or better flash has been smooth for me.
cjb110 - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
The fact that Flash development is continuing, but they just can't get their bloaty plugin to work on mobile platforms is just lazy.Either plan to kill flash, or support it properly on browsers...or at lease allow others too. Give the mobile source to Apache or something.