Apple has been criticizing Adobe Systems lately for what Cupertino perceives as poor performance and design deficiencies in Adobe’s Flash web media technology, which it darned well wants to keep off the iPhone and iPad. Adobe, in turn, has been defending Flash, however gently, citing it as a great enabling technology that has got the web in large part to where it is today. Both companies are correct, and that’s the point that seems to be missed by most of the pundits standing around pointing at the fight. Flash has been vital to the success of the web, but Flash is old.
Apple’s preferred media architecture, HTML5, is the future of the web.
Web browsers have swallowed up most every app you used to have to install on your PC. Something like TurboTax needs forms to input data, display tables of numbers, and store your returns on their server. But if you want to have forms smart enough to know what’s a date and what’s a dollar; to draw piecharts; or store your W-2 on your laptop, then you need a new browser.
Flash always picked up where the browser left off, but it can’t talk to your webcam, store local files, or draw pixels directly to your screen. Now, for the first time, a cluster of technologies known as HTML5 allow a standards-based pathway to busting those barriers with canvas graphics, drawing video onscreen, smarter forms, and local storage for private data. So who needs Flash?
John Gruber is right: Flash is responsible for most of the crashes of my Mac. I can hardly blame Adobe for defending its very successful Flash franchise, though it feels strange coming from that nerdiest of nerdy companies. And I admit there are still a few things that Flash can do but HTML5 can’t, but the evolutionary path here is clear.
Where Flash a decade ago enabled browsers to do more, I can see a time coming soon when Flash will force browsers to do less than they might.
It’s time for a change.
Hmmm, I seem to remember once upon a time you believing taht Apple would buy Adobe in order to make Flash its own…
https://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080502_004815.html
An alternative viewpoint. Most of the readers here miss the point completely.
https://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/
I wonder how much control of my PC I’ll have under HTML 5. I’ve had to work too hard to maintain control with recent web technologies. I find this trend disturbing. Maintaining control isn’t about ego. With increasingly hostile web sites, maintaining control is a survival strategy.
Flash, splash. The market will decide.
Yes! Let’s not think about it. Let’s not try and design something. Let’s just flip a coin, roll a dice or let the market decide! /s
That’s what is meant by “let the market decide”…getting the largest number of people involved in the decision by voting with their own money, not other people’s money.
Okay, Malcolm, let’s hear all about your thoughts and designs.
On the other hand…
Maybe Apple has “Quicktime Lite” waiting in the wings, so from their view, Flash must die.
Another American conspiracy theorist,
John R.
You hit it, Bob – they are both right.
Much of this stuff about Flash is clearly an inside-baseball game that most consumers don’t understand or care about – i.e. who “owns” the platform experience. This battle / screaming match is eerily similar in my mind to Netscape vs. IE. It really wasn’t about the browser, it was about the SDKs, the server infrastructure, and all the stuff you *don’t* see that, had Netscape prevailed, would have made Windows irrelevant, and Microsoft couldn’t have that. (unfortunately, rather than competing on the merits, MS abused their monopoly position, but that’s another discussion entirely).
Clearly, Adobe has been positioning Flash as the way to write things for the web, no different from what Sun has done with Java, no different than Microsoft with .NET, and no different than what HTML5 is trying to do.
Adobe has been the de-facto success story on this – as you said, they were able to make the web do things that browsers just couldn’t do.
But Adobe is a victim of their own success. Just as when Microsoft started getting hit with exploit after exploit after exploit (and still does today), the bugs and security holes in Flash are now getting hammered hard. That’s the price you pay for being successful, so they should be proud of themselves, but they should also be working very hard to fix these problems.
So far, in my mind, I haven’t see Adobe working that hard to fix the problems. Things are very patchwork, haphazard, and poorly done. I won’t list the issues here – you can just Google all the problems and how slow Adobe has been to respond. I have yet to see a “back to basics” kind of approach that Microsoft took towards this (one can argue how well MS did, but at least they appeared to make the effort to restructure themselves toward it).
Adobe to me has always seemed eager to take the credit for Flash success for work that was done before they bought the product, but has always kind of treated it like a red-headed step-child from a future development standpoint. The best thing I’ve ever done for my Mac was install “Click-To-Flash”, which won’t load any Flash on a web page until I click on one of the boxes – my browser and system are infinitely more stable, and it is a great ad-blocker too! 🙂
I’m glad Apple is taking on this fight. This will lead to a better overall solution, regardless of whether the winner is Flash, HTML5, or Silverlight (shudder the thought). In the end, we as the users will win.
Just to point out: Adobe didn’t create Flash, they bought it. And like a lot of other companies who buy their success, they have no idea how to keep it.
The soundfile on your website (and in the podcast) seems to be corrupt. The last 3 paragraphs are not quite included, only fragments.
Hi,
Confirm the audio file is borked.
Sexy, sexy voice FAIL!
Please fix.
Yes, time for a change… to Silverlight! ;-)))))
Seriously, the iPad runs iPhoneOS, not Mac OS X, so why do people keep thinking that Flash will crash the iPad like it crashes Macs?!?! The iPad isn’t a Mac, and Flash works well on Windows, so Flash can be stable if written with care.
“Seriously, the iPad runs iPhoneOS, not Mac OS X…”
You are kidding right? The iPhone OS is the core bits of Mac OS X with a slightly different display server/window manager and a slightly revised API but it is roughly 90-95% the same. You do believe Windows 2000 and Windows 7 are both Windows right? I mean the iPhone OS is probably closer to Mac OS X than Red Hat Linux is to Xubuntu Linux.
All versions of Windows may seem the same to Linux developers, but they are not. That’s why we often have trouble installing Sourceforge stuff on the software they labled “Windows”. I’ve been struggling trying to get all (not just most) of my apps working on Win 7 even though they worked fine in Vista SP2. There is a reason these things were given different names.
Your (Flash!) audio file seems to be broken near the end.
Isn’t HTML5 proprietary?
No, HTML5 is an OPEN standard that anyone can use and create programs for. Flash is a closed proprietary standard that only Adobe knows and only Adobe can create the Flash client you need for your device.
That’s why Apple wants to kill Flash.
I believe that HTML 5 uses H.264 for video playback, which has to be licensed. Mozilla has already gone on record as saying they won’t be paying for an H.264 license. For HTML 5 to be truly free, Theora should be used for video playback.
Your belief regarding H.264 is incorrect. HTML5 does not specify what video format to use. HTML5 does not specify H.264 — it refrains from specifying.
(It’s true that everyone’s *implementing* H.264, Ogg Theora, or both. But that’s similar to some browsers implementing GIF while others implement PNG for images, or some implementing raw WAV while others implement µ-law.)
You’re right, but what that really means is that html5 video isn’t really a standard. In fact, they began with every attempt to put in theora as a baseline standard, not to forbid anything else, but to guarantee that something royalty-free would exist. Apple, who also happens to be a member of the mpegla, joined others in squashing that idea.
Currently h264 is free – as in beer. But that was due to change in 2011. In response to some of the uproar, mpegla has said that they won’t charge royalties until 2015.
The real problem is that this helps to form a “club” in the video industry, on both creation and playback sides. That club can then “protect” itself from disruptive upstarts – the kind of disruptive upstarts that made the internet what it is today, the kind we need for future industries.
@David W.
Flash file format proprietary? The SWF format is openly available to anybody who wants to implement a player: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
@Tobias Hoellrich
whaaa??
That is interesting. So, why hasn’t anyone written a Flash 64 bit client since Adobe hasn’t been able to do it?
Why doesn’t Google or Apple write a SWF/Action Script interpreter in JavaScript and AJAX based upon HTML5? There have been a few feeble attempts, but nothing serious. A good interpreter could give Apple the ability to prove that HTML5 is the future while at the same time, get rid of the issues involved with Flash. An HTML5 Flash interpreter doesn’t have to be perfect: Something that can do about 90% would actually be better. That would be enough to prove HTML5 is the way to go, yet at the same time, show that actually having Flash on your webpage can be an issue, so get with the program.
Or, if Adobe feels Flash is so important, why not write an iPhone implementation and put it on the iPhone Dev Team website (for Jailbroken iPhones). They could show that Flash on the iPhone is robust, fast, and doesn’t drain the battery. If all those iPhone users are really missing the true Web experience because they don’t have Flash, then many of them will jailbreak their phones just to get Flash. Then, Adobe could prove to Apple how much iPhone users want Flash on their iPhones.
One more thing… whatever happened to choice? Ship the iPad with Flash off by default, then when a user touches the missing plug-in box, they are given the following dialog box: “Warning: running this will deplete the battery. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Right now, there’s no Flash client for the iPad, and Apple can’t write one. That’s Adobe’s job. So, there is no choice. In fact, there never has been a choice. Adobe has never written a fully fledge Flash client for any portable system. The best you can get is “Flash Light” which doesn’t work with 50% of the websites that use Flash.
However I remember running Flash 9 running on a 1 ghz machine quite well on Windows without a good graphic chip. So the resources are not a unsolvable issue, the real issue is Apple blocking Adobe, I believe mostly out of ideology which is wrong.
I’m not a big fan of flash either but I don’t think what Apple is doing is helping in any way especially since they are pushing their own proprietary technologies into HTML 5 which would be a disaster and lead us to the same situation some time in the future.
OpenSource has to take over the web, to have a truly free web!
You’re incorrect. Adobe is release 10.1 for mobile. Many devices support it. Just not Apple. People should stop with the technical argument and face the fact. It’s all about business. Apple doesn’t want to give up control of the App store. Period. Every other argument is secondary.
Last time I checked Flash 10.1 for mobile isn’t officially released and won’t be released until mid-year. There is a beta for the latest Android release which I’ve seen around, but none for WebOS, Symbian, or older versions of Android which many phones currently run.
In fact, if Adobe really had a Flash 10.1 client for the iPhone, they could put it out in the iPhone Dev Team community. That way, people could install Flash on their jailbroken phones and prove to Apple that Flash on the iPhone is robust, fast, and won’t drain the battery.
If Flash content is really so important for the Internet, a large percentage of iPhone users would then jailbreak their iPhones just so they could run Flash. That would really show Apple how important Flash is.
So, the next move is up to Adobe.
This article does not apply to people that want choices
Btw. Flash can access your webcam.
@OoTheNigerian no Flash is and thats why it is going to die!
Flash ….. can’t talk to your webcam
Mine does, at least this is what appears to ask me to confirm when I left click and choose “Settings”
, store local files
No expert in the technology, so I don’t know about this one. Certainly I know that Flash caches content, which probably is not what you meant when saying that.
, or draw pixels directly to your screen
ah, Bob, sorry, I disagree with you. One of the reasons for the success of the platform is that unlike that nerdy HTML standard, it allowed pixel perfect positioning of things in a browser independent platform. You and I may not care about one, two, or even three pixel offsets, but there is a whole legion of people, from marketeers to graphic designers, obsessed with that.
Achieving pixel, color and font rendering perfection is not, and never has been, HTML stated goal. HTML was about content structure and degrading gracefully in lower powered devices. Flash completely does away with usability, structure, or anything else, but boy, that bouncing logo looks good.
Merge that with the fact that HTML is nerdy, text based and close enough to programming to scare artistic folks. Together with no tools able to rival Adobe’s and you have the perfect platform for the creation of huge amounts of Flash content of some artistic or design value. This is one of the key success factors for Flash.
If flash crashes the browser it’s because the developer wrote bad code and most likely it’s old script (AS2). I’m sure if the world moves to HTML5 bad development will still crash the browser. I think the bigger reason Apple doesn’t want flash on their mobile devices is because they could easily take away traffic form the App store. In the end the consumer loses.
Well you have to see that HTML5 isn’t something that is run. Unlike Flash, HTML5 is only read by the browser, then “translated” and shown to the user.
You also have to realize that Flash is mostly used for Video and Sound and HTML5 makes this way more easy with way better performance.
Its not about taking traffic away but about the control and commissions on the Apple app store.
Flash apps would bypass most of Apple’s quality, security and branding control checkpoints in the ecosystem of Apple’s golden triangle of: paying Developers, Appstore, and paying end users.
Always needing connectivity is also an issue for Html5 or Flash. How much of these widgets/miniapps can be sucked down cheaply & cached locally is a question I would have to ask.
If the code is cached, then revision control becomes a problem. Typically you get a new “copy” of html5 or flash every time you browse to a content provider. iPhone OS apps are not like that, they are integrated into the low level filesystem in a certain way. Lastly I don’t know how html5 is secured against inspecting/looking at the code by curious end users who manage to get to the raw files (view source in browser is a luxury)
I don’t think you understand how HTML works, theres not “source” protection, you might do some crazy stuff to make it harder but html is just text based and always readable. And if you look at Flash more exactly it isn’t hard to get the source either.
And as you can see with current Google Apps they are fast. In an web app the server can always just deliver whats actually needed so not downloading lots of data that is never needed. Also new version are available to everybody instantly, no need to do anything for the customer.
The only new thing in this respect is that html 5 will offer local databases, for example to manage large amount of data within a session which is too big for a simple JS-Array. However there won’t be a need for revision control and so on since data is always kept in synchrony with the server.
I’d also like to add that after seeing the new flash player 10.1 on android phones and tablets I don’t think flash is going anywhere. If Apple’s mobile devices supported flash they’re would be very little talk about HTML5 killing anything.
I really thought this guy was a bit more software savvy. Let me explain how software works, Bob…
A Flash SWF (or any piece of software) starts out weighing 0 bytes and taking 0 CPU cycles and 0 amount of memory. Than a developer writes some code. Some developers are highly skilled and write lean, fast and non-buggy code. Some developers are less skilled and write bloated, slow and buggy code.
This is true no matter whether the developer is coding in Flash ActionScript, Javascript, ‘C’, Lisp – or any other programming language.
Do you think web applications are going to get simpler and more HTML-like? Of course not. They’re getting more complex and more like desktop software. HTML5 makes heavy use of Javascript. You think Flash is killing your CPU? Wait ’til you get a load of what some poorly coded Javascript can do.
The kill-Flash thing is Steve Jobs trying to make some more money. Period.
Cringley talks tough sometimes about Jobs – but deep down, don’t we all know how much he worships him? Here he’s just shilling for his idol.
Joel, your argument about JavaScript being eventually being a performance killer kind of falls flat. JavaScript is where all the “sexy” is right now in the browser wars, with each company or organization trying to out do the other with the speed of rendering/running and efficiency of implementation.
I don’t see anything like that going on with Flash. I see Adobe making promises, talking about extensibility, etc. but not really making things better.
This doesn’t mean I hate flash, or expect HTML5 to win, or enjoy the thought of Steve Jobs being the sole control point for anything running on an iPhone. However, I just don’t see how one single company (Adobe) can be expected to make a great flash player for every type of PC (LInux/Win/Mac/ChromeOS), every type of phone (Android/Symbian/iPhone/WinMob6/WinMob7Series/etc.). They will make shortcuts somewhere and thus are in the position to create winners and losers.
While Jobs could very well become that person someday, Adobe is in that position now.
If Adobe wants Flash to succeed, open up the kimono. Release it to the public. Open source it. Make it part of HTML5. Let the army of hackers out there rev it like they are rev’ing JavaScript. (Yes, I know that’s crazy).
Writing Javascript code is a mind-numbing exercise in trying to handle all the browser differences. I have to do it sometimes and it’s tedious and inefficient… IE Javascript is different from Firefox Javascript which is different from Safari Javascript which is different from Chrome Javascript – well you get the idea. With Flash you write once – deploy everywhere.
Flash is a better solution BECAUSE IT”S PROPRIETARY. Yes – the ‘P’ word – I said it. Proprietary is better and Plugin is better – and here’s why:
1. Flash can innovate and be on everybody’s device in 8-9 months. Standards-based technologies like HTML5 take 5-6 years or more.
2. Flash can look / perform the same for all platforms because it is delivered via plugin.
Worried about Flash cornering the market and not trying?… Silverlight provides plenty of competition. Yes – there’s room for two plugins in the world.
The market has spoken. Flash is the most ubiquitous software in the World. That being the case – Flash is THE MOST STANDARD piece of software in the World. Not because some muckety-muck standards committee says so – but because the people say so.
I was wondering when the “proprietary is better because it can move faster” was going to be put out there. This is only true in the abstract. IE6 was the “de facto” standard because it came with every Windows box, yet I don’t know a single web developer that “likes” it, MS completely halted development of it when they felt they “won” the browser wars, and now even MS is trying to run away from it as fast as possible. MS Office is a de facto standard, yet the market is growing increasingly frustrated with it.
The problem with these kinds of “standards” is the creator of the standard can decide who benefits and who loses. You want to use a Mac or a Linux box because it is more stable and less prone to viruses? Well, fine, but then you can’t use technology X or Y because the company that writes it doesn’t care about your 5 or 10% of the market. This creates an unfortunate situation where the 5 or 10% never have a chance to become 20%, 30%, 40% due to other technical advances they have made because they are essentially locked out. I don’t see how you can consider that a good thing. To extend that to a practical example, if it weren’t for the standards bodies, IE would still most likely be stuck on IE6, never having seen a reason to do IE7 or IE8.
You are incorrect about the pace of HTML5. HTML5 has actually proceeded rather quickly. It seems like a long time because the W3C got itself wrapped around the axle of XHTML. It took time for them to realize this was the wrong direction, but once they did, HTML5 has really come together fast. The biggest impediment to getting it finished? Surprise! It’s those owners of proprietary technology who try to throw up procedural roadblocks – namely MS and Adobe. Don’t blame the standards body for going slow when the people who are on the standards body who perceive (incorrectly) they have the most to lose are the ones causing the stall.
Again, let me summarize that I don’t care who ultimately wins here – HTML5, Flash, Silverlight, some-yet-to-be-developed-in-a-garage technology, whatever. The fact that there is a fight is ultimately good for us as the end user.
Steve Jobs’s main gripe has been with Flash Video, the main use of flash these days on the web.
No matter how good a programmer you are, it is not going to change the fact Flash is a very CPU hungry video player.
And apparently Flash doesn’t see the finger like a mouse as this programmer and post assert:
https://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/
“So it’s not just that Apple has refused to support Flash. It cannot, logically, be done. A finger is not a mouse, and Flash sites are designed to require a mouse pointer (and keyboard) in fundamental ways. Someday that may change, and every Flash site could be redesigned with touch-friendly Flash. But that doesn’t make Flash sites work now.”
More misinformation.
Here you can see a demo of Flash support MouseOvers, etc on a mobile device
https://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/02/22/flash-player-content-mouse-events-and-touch-input/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+MikeChambers+(Mike+Chambers)
On an iPod Touch or iPhone, how do you plan on generating the mouse over event? Are you going to implement some hokey interface that only has meaning to Flash? Just because a feature is supported on a “mobile platform” does not mean that it is usable.
It amazes me how the tech journalist really have no idea about this issue.
This issue is nothing but Steve trying to destroy a competitive media platform. To make iTunes the one and only gateway to media. To form a Music type grip on the Video distribution industry. Something we defiantly DO NOT WANT.
Banishing flash from the iPad (iPhone he has a point) to me, is as stupid as saying GIF images are banished. Any journalist who does not see this is either, not very good at his job, or writing link-bate.
Some Facts: HTML5 is no Flash replacement. Flash, as a technology still leaves it behind in many way. However, for Web, yes HTML5 should do a large % of what Flash is being used for today.
Performance on Mac is BAD: WHY. this is because Apple has never supplied effective API’s for the Flash player team to use in the browsers. This is now documented in some Blogs by the developers. Only NOW in the latest 10.6 using the latest browsers is the CoreAnimation now available in the browser. 10.1, will take advantage of this and should be more efficient then Windows. ADOBE was not LAZY, Apple put them in that position and Steve then twisted the facts. Steve is a great man but he is known to lie for his own benefit. Take that on board people.
James
From what I’ve read, Apple’s refusal to support Flash on iPad may have
more to do with battery life. Seems that running Flash on the integrated
GPU of the proposed iPad shortens the battery life to about 25% or less
than that of just “reading” an ebook…some estimates I’ve seen say that
the expected battery life of the iPad is like 6 to 8 hours, and that by
running Flash it would lower that to 1 or 1 & 1/2 hours. Maybe Apple
isn’t so “forward thinking” in regards to HTML5, which is only in the
proposal phase, nothing standardized yet, and merely looking to squash
one of the more prevalent complaints about portable electronic devices…
battery life!
Wiz <{;-)
Bob,
The audio version of this and some other entries, only has audio on the left channel.
Just because of the iPhone I decided to NOT develop my site with any flash. Yes I’ll have grumbling users and I still haven’t worked out the video end of it just yet but using a tool called OpenLaszlo has taken me light years ahead of plain old HTML bypassing all the BS of dozens of javascript libraries like Jquery and their idiosyncrasies with all the flavors of browsers. I can deploy my project as Flash 8/9/10 and DHTML, the DHTML part has been wonderful to use and looks great in most browsers especially when using PNG graphics with alphas while allowing me the no refresh look of flash and super javascript pages, iphone/ipad compatibility and a liquid layout to boot. Just my two cents.
Eric, I think you’re a perfect example of why Jobs is starting this fight about Flash to begin with. Steve believes (and I happen to concur, but not because I’m a fan boi) that the iPhone is such a “great” platform that content providers will be willing to create web sites that they know will work on the iPhone.
It seems like every other day I go to some new web site that all of a sudden is formatted perfectly for my iPhone. This seems to be accelerating. I’m still waiting to hear crowing from Android phone users about some Android formatted web site running Flash 10.1 (or whatever it is) that is just SOOOO good and pity the poor iPhone crowd who can’t visit it.
I develop (in my spare time) little dinky web sites for friends of mine who have small companies that want a web presence, and getting them an iPhone formatted site has done wonders for them. Between using no flash, the phone’s ability to turn phone numbers into clickable links so you can call, and plugging into the Maps application, has really helped them out. (Note: this works for Android phone, too).
One thing to consider is that much of flash’s “bloat” is all of the code (and images and vector graphics and all that other stuff) needed to support fake buttons and interactions that are simply not needed when one goes to build a touch-screen interface. All of those events to foster mouse-based usability NO LONGER EXIST when one simply pushes the virtual button on the touch-screen. Flash applications for touch-screen can actually concentrate on what they’re supposed to and leave the rest behind (or as optional loads when the system detects a mouse-based device).
The real problem with not having flash, the one that hurts the iPad as a potential alternative to the netbooks, is social media and the embedding of video. YouTube is the de facto standard and is mostly flash based, no matter how much they say they’re working on adding apple’s format to their back catalog. Other sites (even including facebook, but also the networks that use their own flash-video layers) don’t have the resources to build 2 versions of everything they do, so they’ll look at the market, compare N iPad sales to N*14 netbook sales, and stick with flash.
Apple thus can only sell itself as a rendering platform for commercial downloads and apple-specific streams, but NOT for one for whom the majority of what they get they get via friends embedding it into blogs and facebook. Apple is producing a product that allows you to view what you get commercially over the net without having to go through a computer, which is great for the big media companies.
But not for the consumer, as it becomes clear it is NOT a device for actually living on the ‘net, which is increasingly how people, especially young people, want to be.
And HTML 5 means nothing until Microsoft gets on board. Promises to support it don’t mean a damn thing, and as the experience with IE6 shows, no matter how much you want people to upgrade, too many people won’t, so HTML5 will not get the right level of market penetration to be useful for years and years to come.
And until that happens, flash video will remain THE standard.
One interim solution would be a “flash lite” – a rendering system that works for simple flash-video players while still leaving out all the bells and whistles needed to support the all-flash webpages from hell that so bother me. Had they done that up front, then nobody (in the real world) would have cared because they’d have access to what they expect to have.
Agree, Flash was ground breaking when came out. I’m a physician. Self taught starting in ’98 with Dreamweaver 1.0 followed by flash 1.0.
Manuals at the time understandable. Used flash to draw animated pumping heart and electrical conduction system. ). Could not have self taught starting from 3.0)
Point I want to make is that all these products were MACROMEDIA products and each (plus Fireworks) industry best. Adobe bought Macromedia, presumably for Flash, to aquire what they did not have. I haven’t spent time with web design or updating in almost 5 years.
How much has Adobe taken flash forward since Flashes Macromedia days?
Adobe is on the verge of making Flash THE write-once, deploy everywhere solution for all platforms. In a matter of months, Flash will be on just about every mobile device in the World.
iPhone? iPad? Who cares? iDon’t.
Hmmmm. Joel, I can’t help but think you are an Adobe troll here, having read some of your other comments.
Fact: “Write once, deploy everywhere” is a myth. It will never, ever, ever happen. It has never happened, it will never happen. Lots of technologies have tried, and they have all failed. At some point, something has to run natively on the hardware you are running this “deploy everywhere” code on. Call it a compiler, call it a virtual machine, whatever. And if that thing is poorly implemented or buggy on a particular implementation, then the thing you deployed won’t run.
Adobe *itself* doesn’t even believe in the write once-deploy everywhere model, otherwise AS3 would be backward compatible with AS2, and there would be no “flash lite”. Flash would just be “flash”, and it would just “work”. But it doesn’t.
No technology can predict the future. When Flash was created, there was no concept of touch-screen devices with limited processing power that it would have to run on, so it doesn’t handle that well (if at all).
The closest technology that exists to write-once deploy everywhere is HTML, which is why the iPhone (and Android phones) can load 99% of all web sites out there. But even that technology isn’t perfect, as anybody who has opened up a web page that was written for a 1600×1200 screen can attest – the double click to zoom-in just doesn’t cut it well enough for most folks liking. And so even these web sites are making “phone compatible” versions of their sites. ESPN, for example is one I look at.
The sooner folks quit worshipping at the alter of the church of “write-once-deploy-everywhere”, the better.
“And if that thing is poorly implemented or buggy on a particular implementation, then the thing you deployed won’t run.”
This is a very important point few people understand, and it applies explicitly to Flash.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have been using Flash on Windows, Linux, and the Mac for pretty near as long as all of them have had Flash. One thing was abundantly clear from the outset: The Windows version got a lot of attention. The other versions did not. The Linux version wouldn’t work a large fraction of the time back in the bad-old-days, and prior to version 10 quite a lot of Flash content didn’t work on the Mac, either. Even today it’s pretty easy to find websites that do not function correctly on the current version of Flash on the Mac. (My 9 year old daughter can produce a whole list of them, and tell you exactly what part of the user experience is broken. It is a sore point because I will not allow her to use the Windows PC, given how much of a disaster Windows security/reliability is.)
I don’t have anything in particular against Flash, although I am not fond of the way many marketing folks (ab)use it, but I know from much personal experience that the Flash plug-ins on systems other than Windows are typically deficient in both performance and reliability. People blame that on “bad application writers” and having done way more than my share of portable software work I entirely believe that this is the case, but when the Flash plug-in crashes outright that is Adobe’s fault … and it does crash frequently if you’re not running Windows.
As an aside, I have never had Flash “crash my Mac.” It’s taken out the browser (Safari and Firefox both) on a regular basis but MacOS keeps running. Flash ads on web pages sweat the CPU like nobody’s business, though, keeping the fans blowing on even the G5 Quad … to say nothing of the Macbook. It’s ridiculous that I have to shut down web page views just to quiet the system down enough so I can hear myself think. Whether that’s Adobe’s fault or the Flash app writer I don’t care (though I suspect “both” in many cases), it is a fact nonetheless.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Howdy — If you yourself are having a browser problem, and want to test whether it’s Flash-related, here’s the fastest way I’ve seen to identify the bottleneck:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_stabili.html
“Flash has been vital to the success of the web, but Flash is old.”
Flash is about as old as JavaScript, but the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is new on desktops, and now spreading to the pocket. It’s solving new problems.
“Where Flash a decade ago enabled browsers to do more, I can see a time coming soon when Flash will force browsers to do less than they might. It’s time for a change.”
This part read ambiguously for me — can you clarify? Thanks.
jd/adobe
HTML5 and a new Javascript are probably the future. However:
Flash can access your webcam. You can video conference with it, you can do augmented reality (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp0EyeXayNM) and so on.
Flash can store local files, although in the interests of security it is very limited unless you are running in Adobe AIR.
My mac almost never “crashes”, but it does lock up on occasion, and I’ve never been able to pin it on Flash. I do wonder how people figure out that it was Flash that is causing their crashes. Are people looking at and interpreting their Crash Reporter logs, or just guessing?
I’ve done a fair amount of work in Flash and would like to see it replaced by something completely open. There is more than a little that Flash can do that HTML5 does not, but its probably only a matter of time… IF – and only if – we can standardize it at various levels and get good, consistent implementations across the various vendors. That’s the real challenge.
This is nothing but more Apple arrogance. I will NEVER buy an apple product, no matter how slick, unless I have complete control over what apps I choose to install, and what content I want to view on it. When you buy an Apple product YOU DO NOT OWN IT. They control what you can have, run, and install, and can revoke your access to your content at any time. In short, Apple wants to be Big Brother – Ironic isn’t it?
Apple products are way overpriced, anyway.
I’m not interested in Apple being big brother, either, but are you this strict in your adherence to only buying things you can completely own in other areas? Do you not buy CDs and DVDs? You don’t “own” those, either, you only own a license to play those. Do you not buy software on CD? Because you don’t own that software – you just own a license to use it. Do you have digital cable or satellite TV? You (most likely) don’t own those decoder boxes, either.
If you are that pure, congratulations to you. But I doubt it.
Point being, using an argument about “ownership” is a specious argument. It makes you feel good, but if you were to go through a list of everything you think you own, you will find you are a hypocrite.
This raises a bigger question of “why don’t we own what we think we own”, which dovetails nicely into the “why do I not have as much privacy as I want”, but that is a discussion for another topic.
I own a CD or DVD – its is mine to do with as I please. The “license” argument is an unenforceable legal fiction. As long as I am not doing anything illegal with that CD or DVD (Say making copies and selling them), I am free to play it on any device I own, rip its contents to a hard drive, lend it out to a friend, sell it, or use it for a coaster.
The problem with Apples control of the hardware is that THEY get to decide how I may use my device, and what content I may or may not put on it. The comparison to a CD or DVD is not exact anyway. I own a very nice ASUS laptop, I have replaced the OS it came with, upgraded the hardware with “non approved” components, and installed many apps – all without needing approval from the vendor. In fact, when I decided to replace the OS (I hate Vista) ASUS tech support was happy to help me out by pointing me to where I could find the drivers I would need.
Try and do this with an Apple device? They will try to disable your hardware with the next firmware update.
Apple is Evil.
“As long as I am not doing anything illegal with that CD or DVD (Say making copies and selling them), I am free to play it on any device I own, rip its contents to a hard drive, lend it out to a friend, sell it, or use it for a coaster.”
That’s true of CD technology, but you are not free to play most DVDs on any device you own, only on those whose manufacturers have obtained appropriate licenses, and that is a surprisingly small list when it comes right down to it. For a good many years you couldn’t get software players at all because of licensing restrictions. I haven’t looked recently, but last time I was working with Linux as my desktop system you could not get a legal DVD player for it — period. The production of unlicensed software caused quite a legal fracas, as you might recall, and such software is still illegal today.
We’re seeing the same thing play out with Blu-Ray. (See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD for more information.)
So, ok, the iPhone is pretty well closed (though given its app set “closed” is more technical than practical), and presumably the iPad will be too, but MacOS is roughly as “open” as is Windows — or by some estimations much moreso because the kernel is open source while Windows is totally proprietary. Many people who refuse to run Macs do run Windows … which is amusing to me.
Bob is right in this respect: Unless you eschew technology completely you are probably a hypocrite for avoiding Apple on those grounds.
Personally I would prefer open technology but there are real and reasonable trade-offs to make between open and proprietary. In particular, some content is simply not available in an open format (e.g. e-books, movies). To avoid using closed solutions I’d have to eschew that content entirely. And, frankly, the iPhone is a really terrific technology — closed or not. Look at how it changed the whole phone ecosystem and ask yourself, “if it were not for Apple, when would we have seen technology like this?”
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
[…] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » No Flash in the Pad – Cringely on … February 22nd, 2010 in blog designs, blog technologies | tags: apple, big-fan, especially-since, […]
I only know about video. Flash does more than video, but if video in a player with ordinary controls is all you’re trying to deliver, the Flash Player is unnecessarily heavy — and buggy, cross-platform. Control of the Flash Player inflates Adobe’s role out of reasonable proportion. Say what you like, but Adobe as gatekeeper of no-DRM video on the Web is an unnatural condition that will not hold. Will not. Wrong layer, wrong player.
LQ
Can we end pdf’s as well?
I’d settle for making horizontal scrolling for text illegal and impossible to do no matter how big the font size.
After a little talk with Kevin Lynch, I came away with the impression the fight over Apple & Adobe over Flash is more about licensing of technology than anything else.
I also feel that so long as the iPhone, iPad do not have a built-in Flash support, one cannot go to a site like Hulu and watch movies for free. However, one can go to iTunes and purchase a movie, for a limited time, with a fairly restrictive period of time to watch the movie.
It could be that Steve Jobs feels that by not supporting Flash, it keeps QuickTime viable as a playback technology for Web movies. I am guessing that iTunes store is not powered by Flash.
So long as Apple does not support one of the most popular applications on the planet, I will be unable to purchase an iPad. Why in the world would I buy a platform which has been hobbled out of the box?
One thing Apple is good at is dropping support for old tech before the masses realize they don’t need it anymore. reference: floppy disks
Apple may be pushing that to the extreme in the case of Flash but they just might be getting it right again.
Apple is rightly suspicious of Flash. It represents security and performance risks. Unless Adobe open source their entire plugin code, I don’t see Apple allowing native Flash to run.
However, that doesn’t mean Apple won’t allow access to Flash content. My iPhone app Cloud Browse will allow you to use Flash and Java apps through a remote Firefox browse. Apple has no problems with my app and will hopefully approve it soon.
“Apple is rightly suspicious of Flash. It represents security and performance risks.”
So I’m sure, because of this, you don’t use Flash on any computer you own…?
You suggest people boycott YouTube and other sites because they use “insecure” Flash?
Or…you’re just trolling.
-Erica
I’m NOT happy with the new version of Flash running on my Windows XP PC under FireFox. Everytime I need to look at something that requires flash Youtube, demo etc, my PC slows down to a crawl. Granted it is an “older” PC but it works great for everything else??? I believe that Adobe want to make Flash a silver bullet and continually add hundreds of features in including the kitchen sink. Who needs all the extra junk when all you want to do is watch a Youtube video or two.
A good example of this is the Adobe PDF reader. I gave up on it over a year ago. It was continually getting larger in size and a hog of resources which bordered on crazy. I switched to the Foxit Reader and could not be happier.
Please someone make a decent Flash competitor or HTML-5 support in browsers hurry up!!!
Speaking as someone who made do with a 133 MHz laptop from 1996 until 2007, I’ve learned that they won’t make anything simpler or more efficient. Just go with the flow and get a new PC with Windows 7 and all the power and RAM that will fit inside the box size you’re willing to lug around.
HTML5 might as well take back the web in terms of audio and video, but with Facebook already turning into THE online gaming platform, what about *browser games*? I don’t see Flash going away here anytime soon.
Interesting to note that this web page contains 5 separate panels that use flash – it’s going to be a hard habit to break! I also note that your Flash audio player seems to be sabotaging this particular audio blog!
Although HTML5 replaces the use of Flash for video, there is another upcoming approach that will displace Flash for graphing and presentations:
Check out http://raphaeljs.com/ – A library for Javascript + SVG. Does all the tricks of Flash, but loads instantly. OK, if you’re using IE6/7 don’t bother, as their Javascript support is way too lame.
Looking at the demos on that site, it seems pretty obvious to me that Flash’s days are numbered…
i don’t care about any of this, and most of the public cares still less. we don’t want arcane debates about open standards, we want to watch hulu on our #%%(##$ iphones. now. scratch that–last year!
Speaking for the ~5.7 Billion people who don’t live in the US and therefore cannot get Hulu regardless of whether it uses Flash or not, since it is restricted to the United States:
“We don’t give a stuff about Hulu”
Yes, flash sucks for not being way better than it is, and apple sucks for not supporting flash. I agree. However, flash isn’t the only thing that is old, this topic is old. Where’s the witty cringley I used to know? What has happened to you, man? Do you have some web lacky writing these things. Or is it that you don’t have web lackies to write these things?
They may be both right but you are definately wrong. Flash can talk to your webcam, write files and draw pixels. The next time you upload a graphic on your next blog post, take note that it’s Flash that WordPress uses to upload and allow for image editing on the fly in your own site, Bob. That’s just the tip if the iceberg however as there are more advanced webapps out there in flash that rival Adobes own Photoshop, provides advanced 3D rendering and pixel shading, and hold video ‘party’ conference calling, all without installing a thing (but the base flash engine itself). And that’s Open Source, not the Adobe RTM servers running in the backend.
Geez. Wrong. And in so many ways!
– TurboTax uses Flex. Glad you enjoy it.
– “Flash always picked up where the browser left off, but it can’t talk to your webcam, store local files, or draw pixels directly to your screen.”
Wha-?! Flash has had webcam capabilities for the past 7 years, can store data locally using Local Shared Object, and draws spectacularly. Where have you been for the past 10 years?
– Safari crashes for me 25% when I load my start page: google.com.
– Gruber? Who listens to a guy that sells t-shirts for a living!
HTML 5 is the future, no doubt. But we’re going to regress back to the late 90’s in terms of browser compatibility and development. It’s going to be hell for people working on the development end – 4 times the work for the lowest common denominator.
And Apple is pissed at Adobe because Flash Video buried QuickTime on the web in less than 6 months.
Let’s face it – Flash is just about the worst environment for almost anything on the web and is a horrible thing to program, it’s slow, it’s buggy, needs a lot of CPU, and unstable. But it is ubiquitous and most systems (other than Apple) support it.
Flash might be a good example of what a display and web programming standard should be like, but Flash applications are good examples of what web applications shouldn’t be like. Flash sucks, QuickTime sucks less … is that an improvement?
Bob – I use Click-to-Flash for Safari on my Mac, and couldn’t help but notice that all the adds on your page use flash. Why don’t you do your part to help move flash out the door by making your own website flash free?
I truely hope that HTML5 picks up speed and offers a better web browsing experience for everyone, but I don’t see Flash or Silverlight going away anytime soon. HTML5 is great, but it still just scratches the surface of what is required to build a truly rich application that rivals a modern desktop application. Silverlight and Flash bridge that gap and give the developer much more control over the presentation, interaction, and content management. Check out this feature list for the next version of Silverlight (from http://goo.gl/t0Qb )
Printing API
Right-click event handling
Webcam/microphone access
Mouse wheel support
RichTextArea Control
ICommand support
Clipboard API
HTML Hosting (in browser or out of browser)
Elevated trust for out of browser apps
Local file access
COM interop
Notification (desktop popup windows)
Network authentication
Cross-domain Networking changes
Keyboard access in full screen mode
Offline DRM
H.264 protected content
Silverlight as a drag-drop target
Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
Implicit theming
You won’t see HTML5 doing many of those things anytime soon. It is also why I would opt to by a Windows 7 based tablet instead of the iPad, that way you get Flash, Silverlight, and a full modern computing experience. Seriously when was the last time you had a computer that didn’t support multitasking? Even my TV has picture in picture 😛
The next time I believe in a feature list for the “next” Microsoft implementation of something will be the first time I believe in said feature list. 😛 MS is great at promising things if it keeps people from coding to a competitor’s technology.
I kind of view Silverlight in the same way I viewed the first implementation of MSN. If you remember, that was a technology/portal/community that was developed to steal people from AOL, right at the time that the WWW made both of them irrelevant. The technology behind both of those was superior to what the wild west of the WWW offered at the time, but it didn’t matter.
I think the same will happen with both Flash and Silverlight. And Silverlight is not helped by the fact that MS forces Linux folks to reverse engineer the tech.
Well in this case the feature list is extracted from the current beta build and is expected to hit RTW in the next month or two along side Visual Studio 2010 so it should be legitimate. There still is of course the lag in upgrades, but they are pretty aggressive about updating so within a few months most users with Silverlight will have the lasted version. http://riastats.com shows that Silverlight is starting to get decent adoption rates on PC and Macs, so it is definitely a viable platform for RIA development.
Moonlight is a bit of a let down and seems to be lagging behind by a few years, but considering that Windows and Mac make up the vast majority of the consumer market you can still create a business plan using Silverlight and make plenty of money 😛 Content owners like Silverlight and Flash more than HTML5 too since it provides DRM and other protections for their property.
Very good discussion of the boys at NextStop use of HTML5,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jks-idxVrCs&feature=player_embedded
Also fits into Bob’s theory of GOOG’s eventual demise sown from its own shop.
I also like the coming of Nvidia Ultra Android based tablets.
http://androidcommunity.com/icd-ultra-7-inch-another-android-tablet-with-nvidia-tegra-t20-20091221/
I find web pages with flash slow to load and generally annoying. Too often they are just “flashy” and not informative. If there is a “skip” link, I use that; or I just click away. Plus even if something is given away for free, it’s still controlled by a private corporation. An open standard for the next generation of web content is what we need – and we need a replacement for session . . . session is very convenient so everything gets thrown in there. We need something like a tuple space – redundant, network available (so you don’t lose session if a particular server goes down), and fast. Just another kind of database really, but one optimized for name-value pair lookups. Put in on an appliance and they will sell like hotcakes. This is an idea that’s been kicking around in my head for 10 years or so, but I haven’t done anything with it, so I may as well make it public domain.
session? tuple? Will that eliminate horizontlal scrolling?
I hate Flash. I hope it dies.
everyone does. esp in place of a website.
“Flash has been vital to the success of the web” – I think you are giving it a little too much credit here.
With the exception of YouTube and the like, none of the major sites, search engines and portals that made the web as popular as it is today have relied on flash.
In fact, they know to stay the hell away from it for anything but a bit of animation because it’s slow to load for users and search engines don’t index sites that are actually flash movies.
Without it ever existing, the web would be pretty be what it is today. Not counting the ads, the vastt majority of websites do not use any flash.
I read the other day that the real problem with Flash on the Pad is that you can’t do mouseover events because there is no mouse pointer. I can see that is being a major issue.
Myself, I’m anti-Flash, mainly because too many people also program in sound and don’t put a mute button/checkbox/whatever on their form.
One important issue that seems to be missed in the discussion is the ease at which Flash applications can be created. As an interactive animation IDE, it is simply the best there is and its popularity is proof of that. HTML 5 or any other technology will only gain the traction that Flash has if there are development environments released that the non-programmer can utilize.
Does Flash have underlying technology problems? Sure, but none that are fundamentally intractable. And, it isn’t the best technology that wins. Not least among the issues that determines that is ease of authoring. That is how Flash grew.
Flash reminds me very much of HyperCard in that it gave a lot of power to people who otherwise were blocked from creating useful applications. Steve Jobs didn’t like HyperCard either.
Do not underestimate Adobe, Apple. Do not underestimate the will of the people to see some skin in their apps, Apple. Apple is doing a lot of underestimating. Luckily for the stock, it’s the other way around: people are underestimating Apple’s ability to make money hand-over-fist.
Hahahaha, Doesn’t Cringley use Flash for the audio portion of his blog? Doesn’t WordPress use a bunch of flash for authoring to its site?
Long live Flash!
Remember how Bob left PBS and now relies on ad revenue from his blog for income? This post is pure flame bait and appears to have succeeded. Where is the usual “inside” techy information that we have come to expect from this blog? I’m sure you have all seen the HTML5/Flash argument hundreds of times on other sites by now… there is no possible way you can contribute any original insight. Save your breath people, none of you are going to change anything. All you are doing is endorsing the posting of mindless garbage for the sake of traffic. What’s the next topic? Abortion rates among Ubuntu users?
There’s no evidence developers are suddenly switching to HTML 5 in droves.
Flash may be old but it is being updated – it’s “good enough” for most web developers, so why would they change?
Flash is used (whether or not that is good coding practice) for even the simplest user interfaces on many, many web pages.
Without Flash, on today’s web your user experience is crippled.
I suspect the custom chip in the iPad is simply too anemic to ever run Flash.
An irony pointed out by a friend that read the piece.
In order to follow the link to Robert’s wife’s site, you have to have flash. On his system, when he followed the link, flash crashed.
Wife? Didn’t you see the Xmas card column?
That’s great… But what do you do NOW?
There are a ton of great websites who use Flash, whether it’s good, efficient or not. The fact is, they’re out there and if you have an iPhone, iPad, iPod, you should be able to see them.
Eventually, there will be a backlash against Apple for limited customer choice and trying to force-feed “their vision” of the future. I have been an iPhone user since day one. I’m now looking very seriously at getting a Droid because of this very issue. *I* want to be able to choose what’s best for my experience; I don’t want it forced down my throat.
Our iPhone apps are typically approved in a day or two these days, as opposed to two weeks a year ago. Apple realizes that the current model’s days are numbered. They aren’t opening up the iPhone app market fully just yet, but there are signs that things are changing. For one thing, the fact that app and song preview pages are available as web pages for any browser.
The next iPhone announcement–which may coincide with the official iPad release–should be very interesting. I’m getting the impression that Apple is doing some major revamping of the app market and distribution channel.
But, to address the point about Flash, yes, John is right. It is patently ridiculous that my super duper Macbook Pro with with a dual 2.4 GHz processor and 512 Mb of dedicated video RAM on an nVidia card should ever have to struggle playing video, but that’s what happens with some Flash video.
I can view and manipulate flash just fine via remote desktop on my iPhone and soon, my ipad! Mouseovers and all. If the demand is there, believe me, someone will create an iPhone browser app that runs remote sessions on a flash enabled system. The iPhone is very versatile and provides exactly what it is meant to provide: slick mobility.
Long live iPhone!
How does this affect your battery life? Isn’t it a bit far to go for Flash video?
sorry, but:
– flash actually *can* talk to your webcam (flash.media.camera)
– store local files (shared objects, flash.filesystem)
– draw pixels directly to your screen (bitmapData)
but HTML5 can’t
– do animated Filters with Pixelbender
– alphamask video
– use cuepoints in video
and HTML5’s dirty little secret:
– only a veeery basic support for sound (canvas games are a maditative, silent experience, unless they use flash for sound-playback)
The Flash demise will be a pity. There’s nothing that screams “low-rent” so loud as Flash. Not having a Flash plugin in my browser has immeasurably improved the web for me all these years.
I don’t really know how I’m going to cope now, with all the previously-Flash-only trash pouring through. Ah well, I suppose they won’t stop making trash, so I’ll have to cut back on my end …
Flash also does:
Avoids the true problem of web “Standards” by having a consistent interpreter. How many developers spend their life with if (browswer =”Netscape”) code to handle all of the differences between browsers. And I don’t’ see evidence that makes this go away in html5.
Enabling Enterprise Development with Flex (cool interactive graphs and charts)
Soon to enable iphone development – Flash CS5
Crash – developers, including flash developers, can write bad code. No one has invented a tool that prevents stupid developers from writing stupid code.
Gives designers and animators tools for creating cool stuff that looks good.
Has a small footprint (Install Size) – compare Silverlight, and java
HTML 5 will have the same problem if FireFox, Microsoft, Apple, Google and other all impliment their own “interpritation” of html5. This is already showing the same problems, with lack of common video encoding formats across HTML5 standard implimentations.
The install size of Java is *zero* for end users. All modern machines have a recent JRE pre-installed. Since the JRE can now pre-load the hideous start-up time of the past is pretty much solved (just as starting your web browser or office suite the first time after a reboot can take a little time but the second time around it is very fast from the cache).
Java applets are dismissed as solutions due to their chequered past. Wtih WebStart applets it In facts solve many of the problems with other technologies. For example, after trying to get nice interactivity with Google Web Toolkit I found that AJAX technology is still too primitive to do a nice user interface. So I switched to an applet (with some apprehension given all the bad press over the years). Not only did I find it easy to develop and allowed a far richer user interface I am able to do even more than HTML5 promises – even doing 3D and native code/device access if the applet is properly signed.
After I’d built the applet I expected my users to have problems accessing the applet but none of the users I have did. They were confused by the initial applet download time (the resources in the 2 MB applet takes a few seconds for some) but very pleasantly surprised by the very quick startup time of WebStart apps and the wonderful interactive feel of a rich application and the lovely Nimbus look & feel.
The downside of course is the higher skill level required to build such a nice application. However with recent improvements it sure beats AJAX and Flash for web experience. nb. Silverlight is a non-contender, it’s simply not present on enough devices to make it a worthwhile target – a situation unlikely to change any time soon.
Oh yeah, I ought to mention that the other thing that made applets viable for me are WebServices, which weren’t present in the older days of applets.
For me, Java WebStart and WebServices have solved enough of the problems of the web that I don’t need to deal with limitations of AJAX or Flash. YMMV.
Hi Bob,
Are you aware of the “ClickToFlash” utility?
It seems to work well for me with Safari 4.0.4 and seems to get rid of much irritating web content. But, you can click on anything you want to see.
Here’s information:
https://www.macworld.com/article/138751/2009/02/clicktoflashprospect.html
Thanks for your column – Jim
THE IRONY IS THAT QUICKTIME IS THE BUGGY ONE (IM RUNNING WINDOWS HERE). FLASH NEVER CRASHES ON ME BUT APPLE QUICKTIME IS THE CRASHIEST, SLOWEST, BUGGIEST PIECE-A-CRAP GOING. LUCKILY THERE ARE ONE OR TWO ALTERNATIVES..
The only problem I have with Flash is all the changes you have to go through to have player controls to go along with your embedded player, and as a media pro I have found Windows media files to be much more efficient for web streaming than any other codec.
However, since Flash has become the standard and Mac users couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag when they are forced to work outside of their sacred abodes, Windows wmv files cannot be considered a universal format.
That’s the way it is February 27, 2010. .
Hello,
Apple picks an open standard. That is wrong because everybody is using the proprietary single-vender option. Apple roles-their-own, that is wrong because the world wants open standards that are not dependent on a single vender.
Tossing away those pie-in-the-skie arguments, we need to look at Apple’s business model. A now very successful one. Apple has found its recent successes by adopting and implementing, for themselves, open standards. This includes MP4 (subset of Quicktime), Zero-Conf (Bonjour), LLVM (app build tool), etc.
As far as Apple is concerned, they do not want their products dependent on the whim of a 3rd party vendor, regardless of its current or past quality. Adopting an open standard allows them to role-their-own or use a 3rd party vender – on their terms.
Its been working for them so far.
Dave:
You are saying because Adobe chooses a standard that standard then becomes the open standard?
Yeah right, like iTunes will play on every player.
I hoping eventually all the media producers will see the light, start promoting and distributing their content via their own websites, cut out the middle man such as Apple, and wean the masses off the free content band wagon. It’s the only way we are going to survive and make a living.
Regarding the Flash player I seriously doubt it’s status as the universal standard for web media content delivery will be in serious jeopardy because Steve Job’s says so.
I reread my posting and, no, I didn’t say that. In fact rereading yours, the first two sentences don’t make much sense. Adobe choosing a standard? iTunes playing on a player?
Both Apple and Microsoft are squeezing Flash out. Adobe has to fight this battle on two fronts.
And Apple, under Mr. Jobs, has shaped this industry’s technologies, standards, and product spaces in more ways than we can count. It is naive to state Jobs can’t cause the demise of a technology because “he says so.” He has in the past.
I read your link, and this seems to be more of power play on Steve Jobs side than anything else, and he could easily develop his toy’s to use Flash.
Of course Windows and Apple would like to squeeze Flash out, just as I would prefer to use .wmv files on my website.
Regarding my iTune comment, even my sister has mentioned she would like to be able to play her iTunes on other devices, as she can does with mp3’s.
Fortunately for me, my target audience are mostly family orientated desk top users, and this issue is not that big of a deal.
You really seem to have a dislike for Jobs. Whatever.
Do you have a non-agenda technical reason why you prefer Microsoft’s wmv?
“play her iTunes on other devices, as she can does with mp3’s” is not technically correct. iTunes is a player, that can play and manage MP3s. The Apple store sells content (most without DRM) that can play on any device that understands Sony’s AAC audio format. Tell her to buy a device that can play AAC.
“develop his toys to play Flash”. Apple’s developers cannot. Flash on touch-based user interface will not work correctly with the user. The content must be rewritten regardless to operate with the person’s finger. There is no mouse pointer.
You seem to be twisting things here. My sister can only play her iTunes on here computer or her iPod, not her smart phone.
And yes Apple could make their toys work with Flash based content if they chose to do so.
I refer to these devices as toys, because in reality that is what they are. There are some practical uses for them, but none have supplanted the popular tool that are already being used for the same function.
@ Raul X. Garcia (Sorry to Dave, but I had to reply to you because the chat refused to go any deeper.)
You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about… they ARE NOT CALLED “iTunes”. They are AAC files.
If your sister can’t play THE MUSIC SHE DOWNLOADED FROM ITUNES on her phone, she should just buy all her music as iTunes Plus tracks.
Lots of music from the iTunes store is now DRM-free (meaning you can play it on any device which supports the AAC format, if your *cough* sister doesn’t understand). However, some music you download will still be protected by FairPlay DRM. You can fix this by simply burning the music to CD and then ripping the tracks.
Also, it would be hard for Apple and Adobe to make all Flash content /work/ on the iPhone, even if it played. A touch UI makes no distinction between hovering and clicking, which would make it hard to use MANY, MANY flash websites.
What’s better, having no flash or having half-working flash? I’d rather just have no flash, considering half of the flash things I see/use everyday are ADS. There are alternative methods for getting content that is flash (like the player for this podcast, for instance – I prefer to get “I, Cringely” on iTunes).
An earlier comment made a link to this article.
https://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/
Please read.
The article states something nobody else really does. Flash UI model is based off mouse. Touch-based UIs are fully different than mouse-based UIs. In other words, if we take away discussions of standards, choice, status quo, quality, and business models – what we are left with is Flash content that will not work as expected and will have to be rewritten.
My software alerts me that I just got attacked on this site
Me too. “Security Center” ransom-ware. about 10 AM. Thank goodness I was running Linux 🙂
Well I’m running Win 7/IE8 with MSE. I’ve noticed the “attack” screen at times when pressing the “submit” button. I do hope that Bob will be able to fix it but at least it hasn’t hurt anything (maybe because I turn off the internet connection when it happens). Then I can return to the website. Perhaps it’s tied to the comment button.
When it last happened to me a couple days ago, it was a “website” warning (part of the maleware) not a Microsoft Security Essentials warning. Although I rarely get into that situation, I believe MSE doesn’t bother with “warnings” it just prevents the problem.
Correction, it just happened to me again when pressing “submit” for the above comment. It looks like the fake website is trying to convince us it is downloading some anti-maleware protection or cleanup utility. Hopefully Bob will be able to get to the bottom of this or at least tell us why there is nothing he can do at his end.
Those false alerts have been a money maker for me.
Thanks Bob.
Video is the important part.Here is a good read:
Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of internet video (Diary Of An x264 Developer)
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292
Well I read it and was impressed by his vast knowledge of the subject until I got to the last sentence: “They’re the reason that Vorbis beat MP3 for audio, and now they’re just as important for video.” I wasn’t aware that Vorbis beat anything except in the minds of obstinate free and open software geeks.
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Who is this guy? How can he pretend to talk about Flash with any authority when it clearly doesn’t even know much about it?
Oh yes, and nice Flash-based audio player at the top of your posting.
One of the problems with flash is that it doesn’t meet either the EU or US Disabled Accessibility Requirements. Sorry but I’m with Apple in this regards. Flash doesn’t cut it when you have visually impaired employee using a screen reader. Most times it doesn’t work with the minimal accessibility features found in Windows (Magnifyer, sticky keys, on screen keyboard) so it’s useless in that sense.
On the technical basis, flash is a resource hog. Yes it can be a very clean/elegant format when done right but with everything else, most times you’d have a better chance of a single monkey writing all of Shakesperes Plays at a single go then a flash website use as few resources as possible because no one thinks about it. It’s so easy to use that a trio of blind mouse could create a working site while being chased by the farmers wife but it certainly wouldn’t be a lean/clean site. It would be worse then a pigsty.
Don’t get me wrong, I find flash to be useful but anyone who designs their entire website using it has failed to meet the most basic element of the internet. Access to the information and that’s the biggest shame of all.
Hmmm….
isn’t it rather that Apple cant control what apps you use if their browser supports flash- as all a dev has to do is write their app in flash, thus neatly circuiting App-le’s app monopolisation?
[…] Shared No Flash in the Pad. […]
Developers are still trying to wrap their brains around HTML 5. HTML 5 is like a signed health care bill, I’ll believe it when I see it. Flash still has a lotta legs and has grown beyond it’s orignal intent. Jobs is making a big mistake not including Flash on the ipad. Apple has a bit of an monopoly with it’s iphone and Ipod Touch but the PC tablet market is wide open. Dell HP and even Acer have ipad killers waiting in the wings already and they all are rumored to support Flash. I predict that Apple will have to add some sort of Flash to the ipad or face their biggest flop in a decade.
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When Apple was down and needed Adobe’s help in improving the number and quality of software available on the Mac, Adobe basically ignored Apple’s requests and generally concentrated on the Windows versions of their software and gave second-class citizen status to Macs, creating fewer-feature versions for the Mac, or no software equivalent at all. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and Apple has a dominance in smartphone numbers, maybe Steve Jobs is getting his revenge and letting Adobe experience what Apple did, i.e., having to beg.
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I just hope that apple has learnt from the past and will not try to enforce all sorts of constraints on people who want to make third party products. It was this thinking that started their demise way back
It looks like they may have not 😉
Regards
Mark
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this is dilemma, because I still flash still consistence multimedia tool than html 5 that need more development.
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