So what IS the official line on Flash Aversion? Resource Eating? Taking away from QuickTime?

[M A V I C]

I use ClickToFlash on my wife's PB - I think you were one of the people that suggested using it since it's just a G4.

On my main machine I leave Flash on. I don't frequent a lot of sites that make poor use of it on this machine. On another machine, I don't even have Flash installed.

Let me ask you this - has YouTube Flash video always been slow for you? I think it's changes made by YouTube that makes the problem worse.

IME, most of the time sites bog down a machine it's because of poor practices in areas besides Flash. JavaScript for example, causes more problems than I've seen Flash cause. Constant memory leaks and CPU hogging.

Also, do you have any experience with Flash Lite? My phone has a 312Mhz processor and it plays Flash videos just fine. I would think a 600MHz iPhone or 1GHz iPad should be able to handle it fine as well.

[Winston]

I have never been a big YouTube user, but my impression is that playback has gotten worse over the last year. I could be wrong about this - I really only watch YouTube infrequently, when someone sends me a link or I find one here, for example. But I remember being able to watch YouTube without a lot of fuss. Now, without the jumping through hoops, most YouTube videos are pretty much unwatchable on my TiBook.

However, we have three computers at home I use from time to time, and when you add three children with MacBooks I have watched videos on a lot of different machines. Since I have only really paid attention to how Flash video works in the last couple of days I can't say anything remotely definitive about YouTube playback changing.

No experience with Flash Lite. If there is a version of Flash which works decently then there is certainly less argument for Apple leaving it off of mobile devices. But I don't think Apple is just doing it to be peevish. (It could of course have a lot to do with Apple's relationship with AT&T, and the latter's wanting to limit bandwidth use.)

Installing ClickToFlash made me aware of how much Flash is used around the web. I am not a big web surfer, typically sticking to just a few sites. But I am amazed at how much happier I am using the web with ClickToFlash installed. As you point out, the problem may the implementation of Flash, rather than the underlying technology per se. But from a user's viewpoint it does not really matter. Adobe could have designed Flash so that it could only be implemented in ways that worked efficiently. I still blame Flash as a technology.

While I acknowledge your points about the many uses of Flash (games, etc.), my problems with it are poor video playback and how it slows web surfing. Lots of others complain that it also slows their computer generally when they have several web pages open. I haven't tried to test this specifically, but my ClickToFlash experience supports the idea.


- Winston