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Comment by tomlin | Hacker News Reader

"We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X."

No, we won't "cross that bridge". Colour me skeptic, but I've yet to see DF admit to any of the insufficiencies of HTML5 over Flash.

When confronted with contrarian proofs, the average Steve Jobs allegiant will cite other FUD grab-bags (ex: security issues, battery life, etc.). It's tiring to watch intelligent people pushing HTML5 based on fallacy after fallacy. Everyone wants HTML5 to evolve, but not by the hand of bullshit.

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You're missing the point. I don't think anyone believes that HTML5 does everything Flash does. That said, for the things that people use Flash mostly for these days, such as video, audio, and animation, HTML5 does just fine.

What people like Gruber are reacting to is the craptastic Flash ads that permeate websites today, and the negative effect that they have on performance and battery life.

I've only missed the point if Gruber's points are agnostic. I know they aren't.

> video - kinda. The RTMP equivalent implementation isn't quiet as easy as RTMP.

> animation - this is the kind of bs I'm talking about. Having done complex timeline animation in Flash and JS (with WebWorkers) I can say with all honesty that it is not just fine with HTML5+JS. JS-based timeline animation is clunky at best and incredibly time consuming.

HTML5 and Javascript don’t have to be as good as Flash. They only have to capture the most common use cases.

You're right, they don't. I'm still looking for where it is proven that a well-coded Flash site is inferior to a well-coded HTML5+JS site in terms of battery life.

No one can seem to give a tangible, legible reason why Flash has the unreasonably holy authority to drain battery power.

Ahh, the No True Scotsman fallacy again!

Hamish: No Flash site is inferior to its HTML5 equivalent in terms of battery life.

Angus: Youtube's Flash implementation uses more battery than their HTML5 equivalent on my machine.

Hamish: No well-coded Flash site is inferior to its HTML5 equivalent in terms of battery life.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/No_true_Scots...

> Angus: Youtube's Flash implementation uses more battery than their HTML5 equivalent on my machine.

Apologies for this, it seems to have evidence in it: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

It's hard for me to compare HTML5 to Flash if the Flash version has a truckload of abilities being used that cannot be utilized in HTML5. What's so hard to understand about this?

Does the MacBook fan only come on for Flash? It seems unlikely. Seems like it might engage for CPU-intensive processes that contain audio, video, Internet access (WiFi or 3G isn't cheap on the battery) and a mixture of other features.

I'm not trying to get any one to agree to Flash being better. I just don't see an equal argument. Ever.

But simple CSS3 transforms/animations are hardware accelerated and cover a lot of use cases.

Animation is largely a tooling issue. It will be solved at some point, probably by Adobe.

Why the downvotes here?

Hm.

I read the article. I saw HTML5 mentioned as a fallback for YouTube videos. Which, um, works. I also saw discussion of ClickToFlash as an option for things you want to use and which don't have a non-Flash alternative. Which, um, is pretty darned sensible.

The concluding line -- "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" -- is about the only position it's possible to have. Nobody knows what the future's going to look like, and sticking to something that really does have performance issues right now on the grounds that the replacement might become worse in the future is, well, not so sensible.

So maybe you should talk to your optometrist, because you're apparently seeing things that aren't there.

Possibly. But I know that you don't need a time machine to confirm whether or not advertisers will abuse HTML5+JS. You know they will.

With tongue in cheek, there is no advertisement="true" attribute on the canvas tag. If you were to block CANVAS or VIDEO you'd essentially be halting HTML5 progression. This concern, albeit not backed up with conjecture or reference, is that the use of CANVAS could actually cause some detriment to the HTML5 cause. Why shouldn't we anticipate this probability? Easy: we'll invariably end up with an answer we don't like and understand that an unfavorable result is to come.

The more "Flash is the cause of..." narratives I read, the more obvious it becomes. This fight isn't about standards at all. Flash-driven restaurant sites didn't suddenly become awful. They always were. And Adobe didn't make those sites. Shoddy developers did. iTunes for Windows runs like a fat kid; no one is banging down Microsoft's door about it.

When:

* Adobe Photoshop crashes, blame Adobe.

* iTunes runs like shit, blame Apple.

* a Flash-based site crashes your browser, blame the developer who built it.

No. Flash itself is poorly coded for the mac.

Grooveshark is currently in the background, not playing anything. On my work PC, running XP, it doesn't use any cpu at all. On my personal mac, it constantly hovers at 45% core usage, meaning if I open grooveshark at home, my fans kick on in a 60 degree room.

If you were to block CANVAS or VIDEO you'd essentially be halting HTML5 progression.

With access to a decent selector engine, it's actually not that hard to selectively disable only the things which are (likely to be) ads. I've been doing that for years with nothing but CSS -- the fact that ads come in standardized formats actually makes it easier to put together selectors for them.

um, all he's saying is that we should wait for animated ads to show up in HTML5 and see what they are like before deciding how to disable them or even if it's required to do so.

We don't need to wait to see. We all know that advertisers will demand horrible HTML5 ads. Pretending they won't is embarrassingly hopeful.

Indeed, I've already seen them.

Here's a short writeup of how one of them worked:

http://www.google.com/reader/item/tag:google.com,2005:reader...

See elsewhere in this thread:

[Flash] appears to under-perform on every platform I have except Windows (Windows in VMware + Flash is better than native Mac Flash, I swear!).

Flash has been an albatross for Mac users for a decade. It has performed terribly, crashed our browsers, and with the rise of YouTube &co. forced us to use it to watch videos via a hilarious, incredible, inefficient hack instead of a real native video player.

We are really (and understandably) happy to get rid of it, especially if that means we get to skip the worst kinds of ads and online videos don't churn the CPU anymore.

For all its usefulness, Flash just isn't worth the hassle for Mac users, and it's largely Adobe's fault that we find this to be the case.

Why is this blog even allowed on HN? Most of the posts submitted seem to be written by steve jobs himself, or whatever jobs wants to hear. Can anything come closer to an advertisement?

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