Walt Mossberg Tells Adobe CEO To His Face That Flash Sucks On Android
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That said the point of Flash on Android is not to have guaranteed high performance, fluent apps that work like native ones. That's an impossible goal - for one, Adobe cannot control what kind of Flash/AS code all of the developers out on the web will write.
And secondly on my Xoom with 3.1 - Flash works great enough - no stutter or crashes. Does the job. So as more decent hardware comes out and they optimize Flash even more it will become better.
This whole cult like insanity people have created for and against Flash is mind blowing - it's there you can use it if you want, don't if you don't. No one is forcing anything down your throats folks. For me I will take reasonably working Flash instead of not working at all.
Oh and before you beat up the HTML5 drum - it's not there yet and it's not the absolute reality of the web today.
On the other hand HTML5 is an open standard and thats all it is. Its basically an agreement of what the technology takes as input, and puts out as output. If you want to implement the technology, by all means, go ahead. If group A implements it better than group B, then people have the choice of using the group A technology. Group B will then have to improve their implementation if they are interested in staying competitive, and we all win. That to me is key, the option of using a standard, implemented by different people to make it strive, not a binary distributed and leaving you up to the whim of the company behind it.
FYI: You spoke of windows and Mac OS X, but didn't mention Linux (probably because you haven't tried it, the same way I haven't tried it in Mac OS X.) Flash absolutely blows in Linux as well. I'm not talking just on the gnash and open source flash players, I mean the Adobe closed source build. It stutters, the keyboard input detection is abysmal, it leaks memory all the time, and crashes eventually from all the memory leaks.
Standards are means to an end, which is cross platform applications so I don't have to write the same thing multiple times over. If Flash was done well and it was cross platform, then it wouldn't be a problem for me.
Yes, Flash sucks. But there are certain things for which nothing is better.
That's a great one line summary I will remember to throw out and get back to work the next time Flash sucks conversation comes up (will be pretty soon I'm sure :)
Not to mention it breaks a lot of fundamental browser interactivity - want something to render on top of your Flash applet? FUCK YOU YOU CAN'T.
Scrolling happily along with your mousewheel on a page, then you hit a Flash applet. While your cursor is over the applet, your scroll wheel stops working. Why? God knows, because Adobe hates us and Flash is the greatest bit of trolling ever.
These aren't new issues - these have been around since the very first days of Flash. Adobe simply has no interest in bringing usability up to the standards of the 21st century.
Nor security for that matter - one of my main objections to Flash is that it conveniently circumvents all of the nice security features your browser has painstakingly built into your experience. Incognito mode? Flash won't respect it. Don't like cookies? Well, screw you, Flash will keep its own equivalent anyways. Nice, sandboxed JavaScript runtime? Well, Flash does its own thing (and has its own bugs and security holes... many, many security holes)...
I trust Google, Mozilla, et al to do a reasonably good job protecting me online. I do not trust Adobe - both due to their lack of regard for basic product quality (both stability and usability), as well as their poor security track record of having more holes than a beehive.
If third parties could actually implement a runtime (one that, say, wouldn't suck) then maybe Flash would be a good idea. At least there would be a way to work around a single vendor's supremely shitty implementation.
I don't deny the need and desire for a highly interactive technology like what Flash wants to be (and sometimes is)... but this is not the answer.
The issue here is that Flash got used in all the wrong places. Lots and lots of websites use it for all the wrong reasons, and while you can blame the websites developers for that, the fact of the matter is that Flash scripts are everywhere and regular users don't even notice it.
Because of that, on Android at least your browser experience gets a lot worse -- browser is noticeably slower and it bleeds your battery life like crazy. And users will just blame their phones.
The worst thing about all this - besides the fact that Adobe couldn't pull their shit together to create a version truly optimized for mobiles - because Flash is not an open-standard like HTML5, the others cannot fix it for them. It's not like Google can come up with a new VM (like they did with Chrome), or like how Apple came up with a kick-ass rendering engine like WebKit, that eventually became the norm for mobiles - they can't do that.
That's why standards are better and that's why Flash needs to go and be replaced by web standards. If Flash sucks, nobody but Adobe can improve it and judging by their history Adobe is really week in that department.
And of course, as I said, at the same time Flash is useful for some apps - of course it is, ActiveX was useful too.
The only thing that Flash is used for that real people (as opposed to marketing twerps) actually like is cheesy little games, and they can be done perfectly well without Flash these days.
There are a lot of cool websites that use Flash for more than games and video these days. Qwiki won TechCrunch Disrupt last year. Beatlab is a super cool music creation app.
And Flash will likely always be the standard for DRM Video on the web. Being an open standard, HTML5 can never include DRM.
I see Flash's place is as a stopgap for features that haven't been standardized/implemented yet. It does those very well.
Flash file uploaders also tend to be more mature and a little smoother to use in general. I'm sure HTML5 will surpass it soon enough, but at present, it's a use of Flash that I don't mind.
Additionally, I somewhat dread the day when annoying and/or malicious advertising makes the switch. At present, blocking Flash is a stupid simple task, a standards based annoyance has the potential to be much harder to avoid.
http://www.publicstatic.net/media/adminfiles/flash_not_relev...
Still waiting, all this time later. The killed the beta some time ago that ran on Linux. It seems there's some hard problem they're unable to solve, or just don't care.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/876475/Fun/FlashMemoryHog.png
I have 12GB in the machine, but it saw the need coming and prepared for it. :-/
But that's besides the point as no one will actually do it effectively - may be the spec is insane and it is impossible to make the pig fly.
But the real failure is not of Flash/Adobe - they went out and _did_ something to make the web richer and provide people with a tool to do what they want when progress on rich, dynamic, more capable standardized Web was painfully slow. The failure is of the Web Standards - I may be slightly off base but till this date HTML5 can't do half of what Flash is capable of doing. The only other alternative is Silverlight - not exactly better as it is less open and ubiquitous than Flash is.
[ On Linux : Using since '96 - But recently gave up on Linux as the Desktop. The latest I tried Flash on Fedora, it was screwed up because Flash gets memcpy wrong - overlapping - and some jerks decided to be uptight about it and fixed memcpy to break Flash. They may have their reasons and justifications but I no longer want to deal with that stuff anymore. Still contribute non-trivial patches to the kernel and manage a bunch of RHEL boxes - so still do Linux but just not on the Desktop.]
Flash specs are open
First, before May 1, 2008 the official specs for the swf format couldn't be used to create alternative implementations. If you read them, you were tainted. Even after, the spec didn't contain essential info like details about the RTMP protocol.
Second, it took an awful lot of time for Adobe to release specs, and the specs aren't really useful since devs from Gnash and SwfDec did a better job by reverse engineering, which is still legal.
And it can't help when Adobe is suing Wowza (as in, right now) or when it pulls rtmpdump from SourceForge with a DMCA request (May 26, 2009).
Third - open, as in public specs, doesn't mean it's a standard. It would be a standard if you were allowed not only to create an alternative implementation (debatable if you can) but if you were able to improve on it, improvements which may also be accepted in the standard.
And a real open standard requires a standards body, not a company that is willing to sue using patents whenever they feel like they aren't in control anymore.
If anything, the "opening" of those specs means absolutely nothing. Flash is still as closed as it was prior to May 2008. The only difference between now and then is the maturing of projects like Red5, but such projects are in a gray legal area. And THE alternatives to the official Flash client are still mostly unusable.
Go ask the Gnash or SwfDec developers about the openness of Flash.
I am not against Flash though, I just wish they would put more effort into making it efficient and reliable on all platforms.
I have a new Xoom as well, latest everything, including the Flash update from 2 weeks ago.
Flash video drops frames, stutters, freezes, and occasionally locks Browser up completely.
On the other hand, native HTML 5 video tag plays gloriously.
"Watch the smug get slapped right off of Narayen’s face after he laughably tries to claim that contrary to Steve Jobs’s argument that Flash is a dead technology, it’s currently running on 130 million Android devices."
That's pretty disappointing. So here I am in the HN comment thread hoping someone will say something interesting and technical.
It probably stems from the fact that the development studio is designed more for artists than developers, allowing artists to toy with adding functionality to their creations but not really giving them the years of training it requires to understand performance implications.
Adobe can't really make this claim, even though they are fully aware of it, because it is never good to badmouth your customers. So they are left with taking the heat for them instead.
Contrast this to the native Android or iOS development environments which cater to experienced software developers.
Although I feel that Adobe has to take some credit for the structure and evolution of Flash. Adobe has always been more about adding 50 average features to sell a software suite than to focus on better/faster/stable. Unlike Microsoft who owns the OS or Apple who makes hardware their core business is selling new tools, so there is no "bigger picture". The result is bloatware.
Here are the historical file sizes of the Flash Player installer (compressed .exe for Windows ActiveX Control):
* Flash Player 2 (1997) = 0.2 MB *
* Flash Player 3 (1998) = 0.2 MB *
* Flash Player 4 (1999) = 0.3 MB **
* Flash Player 5 (2000) = 0.3 MB **
* Flash Player 6 (2002) = 0.5 MB ***
* Flash Player 7 (2003) = 0.6 MB ***
* Flash Player 8 (2005) = 0.8 MB ****
* Flash Player 9 (2006) = 1.5 MB ******** (first Flash release after Adobe acquired Macromedia)
* Flash Player 10 (2008) = 1.9 MB **********
* Flash Player 10.1 (2010) = 2.7 MB **************
* Flash Player 10.2 (2011) = 2.7 MB **************
* Flash Player 10.3 (2011) = 2.9 MB ***************And then the programs keep asking to be updated every five minutes like a kitty that's hungry. In fact I'm looking at my CS3 icons vs my CS5 icons in my dock and even the new icons looked bloated. In fact even the ordering process of upgrading CS is bloated —- it was as if I had to read a manual to figure what the differences were and what the upgrade cost. And I say this as someone who has used their software since Photoshop 1.0 and grew up in PageMaker (which to be fair was Aldus).
And did I mention that it took me longer to install the CS suite than to upgrade to Windows 7??? And I didn't even install all every package (and it still put code from some of those programs on my harddrive).
Apple can (in theory) validate that the things going through the app store aren't total malware. In-browser? You're on your own, for good or for bad.
What's more, Adobe would never have put this much effort into making Flash suck less on mobile platforms if Apple had decided that shitty Flash was better than no Flash and went ahead and shipped it with iOS.
They took it very seriously, as well they should. It was clear that mobile, even then, was going to become so big as to start directing change on the desktop. If Flash is left out of mobile, Adobe's relevance is seriously threatened.
That said, I think the 'personal' nature of their response is just posturing. They're taking a victim stance to stir up sympathy because, well, they can. The press will respond to that story far more readily than a straight technological disagreement. And boy have they. It's confusing the issue long enough for Adobe to adapt their authoring tools to kick out competent HTML5, which will protect their revenue stream in either case.
I have yet to test a single [Android phone]
Ok, cheap shot, but I really think he's not actually tried it on high end phones with reasonable flash apps that are designed for mobile use. Yes, if you go to cnn.com which fully expects to be running on a desktop it stutters. It stutters on some desktop computers too. But go to the mobile games sites that specialize in Flash games for phones - and many of them are great.
I hear that argument a lot, but I've never found myself where a kludge of a technology really saved the day. I lump it with the web browser on the Kindle where the idea of having it available is much more interesting then even the desert island use of the tech.
> The value proposition Flash has is that we allow people to author programs once and get them to as many devices as possible
He says "devices", clearly indicating that he is arguing the value proposition is to deploy across multiple phone (or mobile device) platforms, not some kind of write-once-run-anywhere proposition that works across desktop and mobile.
In this interview from last year he states [1]
"The world is emerging where there are multiple devices [...] to access the internet
Mobile devices are certainly a big part of it, tablet devices will be a part of it, televisions and PCs..."
the more these platforms adopt flash, they won't have to do anything else. It will just work"
Seems pretty clear to me.
[1] http://www.flashstreamworks.com/archive.php?post_id=12726539...
I admit it does bog on occasion but I attribute that mostly to flash apps that were designed on and for desktop PC power. I also have run HTML 5 sites that bring my desktop computer and browser to its knees but I don't scream "HTML 5 sucks!" Perhaps my experience is unique.
I'm even willing to suffer slightly for this in the meantime -- even if that means you can access Flash (poorly) on an Android device, and I can't. Apple's position has already resulted in a fairly dramatic decrease in the number of flash-only websites, and I won't cry if I see it disappear entirely.
I have not seen any technical arguments as for why this would be. I imagine that when all the inexperienced flash programmers move over to HTML5, we will end up with even slower HTML5 based animated ads and an even more fragmented browsing experience due to the lack of standards for video and audio. Worse, since these technologies can be more thoroughly integrated into websites, it will be far harder to block them.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to "Canvas Block".
Although canvas is awesome when used responsibly.
canvas {display: none !important;}
> I have not seen any technical arguments as for why this would be.
That's because you're looking for a technical reason when the real reason lies in strategic interests and manpower concerns.
If I'm Apple or HP or FoobarCorp, and I'm readying the brand new iWidget or TouchFob or FooPad, running my OS and browser, and relying on Flash for rich web content, if there are performance or stability issues, I have to punt them to Adobe and wait in line behind Flash for Windows, Flash for OS X, Flash for Android, and whatever other priorities Adobe has in front of me before they allocate manpower to my problems.
But if rich web content is built in HTML5 + JS then I can send my engineers into our Webkit fork/Gecko engine/IE-wrapper/telnet-front-end to make things work right on our bizarro CPU or GPU or whatever it is that Adobe would have done a piss-poor job of optimizing for.
Relying on a single choke point to deliver good performance to everyone has failed miserably. Independent, self-interested groups are more likely to do a better job of each optimizing HTML5 performance best for their own needs.
The fact is that HTML5+JS is miles behind proper performance let alone cross browser compatibility.
Flash makes your browser unusable, because it consumes a lot of battery and makes browsing slower. And it's doing this without you even noticing, since many websites include either crappy Flash commercials or at least some .swf that sets Flash cookies for better tracking.
The sad part is that the first 2 days I blamed my phone for the piss-poor battery life, but after I disabled Flash and uninstalled Skype my phone's battery now lasts for 3 days instead of 6 hours and the browser runs smoothly.
Much better than not having it at all.
Hope it helps.
So this notion is not very surprising.
Every time the argument comes up I feel as if there is a section of people trying to convince others that Adobe is the devil. Flash has its place on the web until something comes along that can properly replace it. HTML5/CSS3 is just not there yet but it soon will be.
If anyone knows a little more about how Flash works on the mobile, please share.
that also means that you cannot play local .SWF files on android unless you manage to get them inside a web page...
Fact is, all Adobe had to do to "win" this PR war was jailbreak and iPhone, developer a version of Flash for it and then show it off to anyone and everyone who wants to see what a great experience it can be.
Instead, Adobe would rather just lie back and say "there's no point in trying", which is an obnoxious mix of laziness, incompetence and arrogance.
What's worse is the number of people who have bought into their BS.
Does Apple want Flash on iOS? Probably not. But with good reason. And who really cares? Producing a compelling Flash experience on mobile (something that STILL doesn't exist, even on Android) would've gone a long way to forcing their hand.