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Comment by tomlin | Hacker News Reader

"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources."

Weird. It's like Steve Jobs wasn't telling the entire truth, or something.

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More like Adobe has finally poured some engineering investment into making Flash work decently on a mobile platform. By all indications 10.1 is a massive improvement over 10. It's still not quite as good as Adobe are saying, but it seems to be a lot better.

For what it's worth, this is exactly what Adobe should have done from the start instead of wasting their time trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone. Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it.

And we have Steve Jobs to thank for that. I believe that what would solve many of today's economy problems, is just a bit more balls from companies. Apple rocked the boat and we got better service. More rocking from all sides please!.

>Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it.

But Android is the only smartphone in direct competition with the iPhone, and Android only really picked up steam in the past 8 months or so.

None of what has transpired in the last few months smells of ultimatum. It's all very childish.

Great. So Apple will support Flash now that is it up to snuff? Please.

Probably not now, after the lines have been drawn this sharply. But what sort of argument would Apple have been able to present against Flash if a full mobile Flash port had been up to snuff two or even three years ago?

First he said you didn't need a native SDK, you could make-do with web apps, then they released the SDK.

Then he said Apple had to approve apps because otherwise very bad things would happen, but with 50000 apps and millions of users, Android showed that's not the case.

Now he says Flash is bad for mobile and Android is once again showing that's not the case.

The best part is, you don't have to care what Jobs says as much anymore. I switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One a few months ago and after watching the Froyo keynote, I have a hard time imagining going back.

That's not what Engadget says.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/android-2-2-froyo-beta-ha...

Money quote: "our beloved handset got piping hot after about 30 minutes of heavy video watching, and the battery indicator in the upper right had a sizable dent."

Actually the real money quote is: "the pre-release beta we have, according to Adobe, lacks hardware acceleration"

You really can't judge the power/heat of a version w/o HW acceleration.

I think those are two very different contexts to the useage of flash on the phone. After 30 minutes of watching video versus opening up a webpage that is based in flash are not very compariable.

Who cares about websites made in flash? People want flash for games and video. With that in mind, I think that engadget tested the context that most of us care about.

The article also pointed out that pages that would otherwise work fine on a PC were borked or had slow performance. This is not the 1-to-1 flash support I think users are expecting.

Two hours of Flash = 40% battery drain. That's still a bit high. Watch a movie on the plane, play a game or two, and you land with a halfway drained battery.

Understandable why Flash might be excluded. This level of performance is "acceptable" for most of the industry but not up to the seamless level Apple strives for.

frankly i don't care about hours of continuous use. what i care about is that i can look up a restaurant and read their hours and menu. it takes 2 minutes. the iphone can't do it.

From Apple on iPhone battery life: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G"

That level of performance is acceptable for Apple.

About twice as long as that in WiFi. How long would Flash 10.1 play over WiFi?

Your contention was 2 hours and 40% was outside Apple's standards. I merely demonstrated that it was, in fact, within Apple's standards, as demonstrated by their own stats.

More importantly, this demonstrates that Flash doesn't kill battery life as propose by Jobs. 5 hours of heavy web usage of heavy flash sites doesn't sound unreasonable.

Nope. To do that, you'd have to talk about performance strictly under 3G, or you'd have to talk about use under conditions like onboard a plane.

There should be different expectations for mobile use. 3G use is already a drain, and you're asking to add another drain on top of that.

The question to ask, is how would Flash over 3G do? If we're down to just a few hours of battery life, it doesn't sound attractive anymore.

I disagree. I've already shown that 5 hours of use is acceptable in Apple's world. On top of this, 3G isn't the only available connection. The iPod is completely non-3G, and the iPad has a non-3G variant working just on wireless.

Apple's contention was that Flash would destroy mobile batteries. This is clearly not the case.

Look at it this way: With Flash, the battery life is 5 hours. With 3G, the battery life is 5 hours. Yes, on 3G, the battery life might be worse, considering you are using both 3G and Flash.

But then, where do you draw the line? If 5 hours is acceptable battery life for 3G, if I don't have 3G, could I have Flash and get the same battery life?

Finally, that's 5 hours of 3G browsing the internet. Is that 5 hours of streaming video content? I don't know, the website doesn't say. However, the Wired article makes remarks this is party what he was doing, streaming flash videos over a wireless connection.

Hopefully that explains it better. Flash clearly doesn't kill battery life. At least no more than 3G does.

I think Apple's point of view is partly that 3G offers something you couldn't get otherwise, whereas Flash replicates things already available on the iPhone/iPad platform. Therefore, 3G battery life issues are acceptable, where as, for Apple, Flash is not.

And, you can't offer Flash on non-3G variants, because then you know people would want it on the 3G variants.

You're saying that Flash "clearly doesn't kill battery life" but then go on to say it's no worse than 3G... well, yeah, but lots of people have complained about 3G's effect on battery life, and much of the time both features will be used at the same time so the effect on battery life is "stacked".

And keep in mind how much Flash you'll be running "unintentionally" doing just normal browsing (on 3G or not) in the form of ads and the like. Flash doesn't only come into play when you're playing Farmville. So this is something that affects a lot of browsing.

On that note: how does backgrounding work in Flash Player 10.1? Can I play Flash-streamed audio in the background while I browse other pages (via "tabs") or use other apps? If not, that's one more plus for native apps over in-browser Flash. But if so, what happens if I have 5 different pages open, each with a couple of Flash ads -- do they keep executing in the background?

Those are good questions, and honest concerns.

First, yes, 3G does "Kill battery life," but with regard to Jobs and Apple, they made it seem like Flash was something so much worse. While they never compared it to 3G, the sense was that it was a lot worse than it seems to be.

Maybe a better approach is to say Flash doesn't kill battery life anymore than other Apple implementations of other technologies.

As for the rest of your comment, that's more of an implementation thing. Done intelligently, most of what you are talking about is a non-issue. I'll try to explain.

First, Flash doesn't have to run normally. Flash support can be activated. This avoids the torrent of flash ads that can run rampant on websites. However, if I go to a website, and I want to run the application there, I can choose to enable it. Something like this is already done with the YouTube app on the iPhone. You go to a video page, and you click on the Play button, a simple image. In Flash's case, it would explicitly enable the flash player to activate.

People do this already in browser. They block flash for the most part, and enable flash in certain, particular cases.

As for backgrounding v.s. native apps, that's a non-issue. Native apps will always be better, on any platform. The problem is, not every web app can have a native iPhone app.

In your example, the flash web page could be treated like every other web page. In this case, does an HTML5 video continue playing if you open a new tab? Does it keep executing in the background?

The idea isn't to recreate the native functionality, but give Flash support so existing media that exists now can be consumed. Media that HTML5 has no support for, and cannot deal with.

If I had Flash on my phone, I'd definitely want it to have functionality like you describe, where you have to tap to enable it. I'm sure it won't be that way out-of-the-box, though, and only a small minority of users would know to install a ClickToFlash equivalent even if it were available. So the default and by far most used configuration will be one where Flash is running much of the time that 3G is running too.

I certainly agree with you that it's not a dealbreaker for Flash in web pages to not be backgroundable. And I'd prefer it to be the case that it's not backgrounded in the general case.

are you allowed to have your phone switched on on the plane?

With the exception of takeoff and landing, electronic devices are generally permitted in flight. The radio can't be switched on, but many smart phones including the iPhone have an "Airplane Mode" which turns the radios off.

Some airlines do not allow cell phones in flight/airplane mode.

So Adobe could have fixed Flash at any time, they just didn't feel like it?

"Adobe says it has made tweaks that will shut down the Flash Player 10.1 when the system runs out of memory."

I'm not sure that I would call that fixed.

The player has had major changes in terms of memory use, frame/execution timing, and how it is suspended or not. You're taking one phrase from a non-tech person and judging from that.

I took that as a paraphrased quote from a tech journalist.

I hope you are right though.

I know from my experience with Flash on Linux that it is insane, Flash eventually consumes 4gb of memory and slows my computer to a halt. I finally just removed the plugin and browse without flash.

You can read the release notes to understand the changes, they detail them pretty well. First 7 pages are changes.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote... (PDF Link)

Also there is a huge number of bug fixes in this release... don't know why they didn't just call it Flash Player 11, it's not really a dot release.

Flash is an application platform. If it runs out of memory, it's an application that is responsible, and Flash naturally has to compensate.

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