De wonderen zijn de wereld nog niet uit. As we all know, Flash is a terrible resource hog on just about any device. Even my quad-core desktop space age computer sees spikes in processor usage whenever Flash rears it ugly head, let alone my poor Intel Atom-based devices. Well, it seems Adobe finally pulled its head out of its behind, and has committed itself to enabling proper Flash performance on Atom-base devices. The catch? You need a Broadcom Media Accelerator, or an NVIDIA graphics chip.
Because backroom deals and proprietary hardware are the better solution compared to JUST WRITING GOOD SOFTWARE TO BEGIN WITH?
Grief, the APIs are there Adobe. Windows has WPF, Apple has Quartz2DE, use them.
Apple, or somebody, please buy Adobe and then proceed to fire the entire programming staff, and then make Adobe products no longer suck because the world doesn’t need any more of Adobe’s ass-backwards mistakes.
Yup.
I never understood this. Microsoft can optimise the heck out of something as complex as Vista and make it faster and leaner with Windows 7. Apple has been able to do the same with Mac OS X for a few releases as well.
And you tell me Adobe can’t do the same with Flash?
Even worse, open source programs like VLC play flash movies smoother than flash itself
No joke. Thank goodness for the K-meleon browser otherwise I couldn’t watch Hulu on my PIII 1Ghz HTPC, because Firefox and Flash would be too much for it at the same time! Too bad Netflix doesn’t work with K-meleon.
Wrong, they use different display logic, where VLC only displays video, flash can display a lot of stuff over the video (user don’t really need it but the feature is available).
Flash is slowly following the path of macromedia shockwave path.
Actually, you don’t need flash (or Silverlight for that matter) in order to “display a lot of stuff over the video”.
Ordinary web standards (those being HTML5 video tag, Javascript/CSS3, SVG and animated PNG) can do all that.
http://blog.dailymotion.com/2009/05/27/watch-videowithout-flash/
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=n…
Strangely enough, IE supports none of this. You will need Firefox 3.5 to see the full effects.
If you have a pre-release version of Firefox 3.5, the demos are here:
http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo
More about what can be done using web standards is here:
https://library.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Web_Graphics%2F%…)
Edited 2009-06-03 14:16 UTC
Subtitles
Flash is a terrible resource hog on just about any device
That should read “Every Adobe Product” is a terrible resource hog, and it keeps getting worse with each release. Adobe is the king of Feature Bloat.
Ain’t that the truth. They’ll pry Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 from my cold, dead hands.
Requires a Broadcomm graphics processor. It will be nice and incompatible then 🙂
I normally don’t wish something bad upon someone/something, but I hope Silverlight kicks ass and grabs a majority of marketshare, thereby forcing Adobe to make drastic performance improvements to Flash.
Hell no. Worst possible outcome imaginable.
Thankfully, it doesn’t look like happening.
The solution is not to substitute one horrible plugin for another but to get rid of plugins altogether.
Maybe once the HTML 5 spec is finished by the middle of the next decade and actually implemented by most browsers sometime around 2020, and implemented by IE sometime around 2030 we can burn both Flash and Silverlight and be rid of this nonsense once and for all.
That would be an acceptable situation – use “Flash” in the same way ordinary pictural / image files are used in a web browser. Just imagine you would have to install a plugin for JPG graphics that “accidentally” isn’t available for your platform or browser… Of course, tha ability to TURN IT OFF is a “must have”, as it is already possible with graphics, for example in Opera where you can switch off graphics and CSS.
The problem I see is that “Flash” seems to hook so deeply into the system that it can’t easily be implemented in all (!) browsers. Otherwise Linux and UNIX browsers would already include “Flash” for years by default. But such a solution would require that “Flash” is made an open standard (or a standard at least, which it isn’t).
WE’ll see. But in fact, I think there will soon be other “modern technologies” that get their way around HTML 5 and do something similarly stupid. Furthermore, I think MICROS~1 will have much responsibility for this development… 🙂
The catch? You need a Broadcom Media Accelerator, or an NVIDIA graphics chip.
And Windows…
The great irony of the whole thing; Silverlight is hardware accelerated and it won’t be too long before Moonlight is.
I have nothing against Flash, what I do have against Flash is the fact that they’re closed source and refuse to work together with opensource projects (or establishing their own opensource project) as to create an opensourced version of flash that is fully compatible in every facet with the proprietary version.
Nice, new hardware just to make Flash sucks faster…
From TFA: “Adobe will be working directly with Nvidia on optimising Flash for all of Nvidia’s graphics processors, including the Tegra system-on-a-chip that the graphics-chip company is pushing as a rival to Atom in the netbook and mobile internet device (MID) markets.”
How did this get left out of the article posting? This is awesome news!! It means that Adobe is optimizing Flash for ARM!
Edited 2009-06-06 12:44 UTC