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What is the problem with iPhone and now the iPad --- it clearly has some graphical power
and now we know the beginning of where the Power6 chip guy from IBM will be spending some of
his time - making ultra mega processors for portable proprietary stuff ---- but what about Flash?
What is the problem between Apple and Adobe on getting Flash into some of the devices?
Is it purely that it requires so much processor resource or what?
(prefer real answers or speculation with a basis in knowledge)
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This isn't hard. Have you ever used Flash on the Mac? Or Linux? Or even Windows? It is not well optimized. Only recently has Adobe even started working on optimizing Flash for any platform. Hardware acceleration on Windows only (when it comes to h.264) arrived with Flash 10.1. Some hardware acceleration on other platforms started arriving in early/mid 2009 with Flash 10. I think that's the timeframe anyway. Hard to edit on the iPod touch so bear with me.
The Flash plugin on the Mac is still 32bit. Barring other technical reasons, if Apple wanted Flash (the only third party browser plugin that ships with OS X) to work with 64bit Safari on Snow Leopard, they had to create a system that ran plugins as a separate process. When will Flash become 64bit on the Mac? Who knows? Apple has to wait for Adobe. What company in their right mind would cede control of content distribution to a lazy (incompetent?) third party developer?
Nathan
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Check Adobe for the info. Hardware acceleration only works on Windows. Check a look back and see how recent hardware acceleration was added.
Nathan
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silvarios wrote:
if Apple wanted Flash (the only third party browser plugin that ships with OS X) to work with 64bit Safari on Snow Leopard, they had to create a system that ran plugins as a separate process. When will Flash become 64bit on the Mac? Who knows? Apple has to wait for Adobe. What company in their right mind would cede control of content distribution to a lazy (incompetent?) third party developer?
Nathan
Something doesn't add up here. Apple includes Flash as "the only third party browser plugin that ships with OS X", but it doesn't work very well. Also, what about Java and JavaScript? Aren't they third party too?
Should we be lobbying for ClickToFlash to also be included, so that Flash only loads when a user requests it? Would this put pressure on Apple and Adobe to sort it out?
Flash runs very poorly on my TiBook. It's the one thing that may push me to upgrade to a newer computer. I can't run any Flash video decently. Even with ClickToFlash's h.264 option YouTube videos have mostly become unwatchable in Safari. I think this is ridiculous, as for years QuickTime provided just as good quality (from my perspective) and worked mostly without hiccups.
How did Flash get so entrenched?
- Winston
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JavaScript is not a plug-in and even if it was, the Javascript engine in Safari is not third party. Likewise, Apple maintains their own builds of Java. Apple does not build the Flash plug-in.
Flash became entrenched because of the proprietary Real, Windows Media, and QuickTime wars. It was easier to ensure people had Flash installed rather than three different media architectures. That's my opinion anyway.
I don't hate Flash. It works okay. Unfortunately, Flash is poorly optimized for most of my hardware and often poorly implemented. Flash for web navigation needs to die sooner rather than later.
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Flash 10.0 and prior versions is not well optimized for Windows either. Even on Hulu's lowest quality setting, it stumbles a lot on 1.6 GHz Intel Atom based Netbook running Windows XP.
