Does Adobe Flash actually outperform HTML 5?

ClickToFlash.

Mac users have the ability to render shut flash off. In addition to not draining all your system resources, the videos on YouTube are infinitely better quality in H.264. As a Mac user, I could care less about Flash.

Sounds magical. Does your mac eat rainbows and shit butterflies too?

so Mac’s are great as long as you don’t wanna use Flash or run Windows programs…
which in my world translates to USELESS CRAP

Oooooh, snap! Once again, Jobs’ arrogance and closed platform is his own downfall. Just open up the stupid APIs, and bingo, you have a decent product that supports Flash, like everybody wants. Seriously, why is that such a hard thing to do? I’m betting it’s because he’d have to swallow a truck load of pride to back down now, and I don’t see him doing that. When he got sick, there was much talk about “Apple after Steve Jobs”. I for one think it would be much better off. In fact, both Steves need to just go away, both Jobs and Ballmer. Once these nutcases are out of the picture, perhaps these companies can put people in charge who actually still live in reality, and can adjust their companies’ futures accordingly.

Duh – the obvious question is where does Silverlight fit in here? Yeah – right now it doesn’t have the market penetration of Flash, but that’s changing fast and it’s possible Silverlight will be on mobile devices before Flash. Microsoft haters can flame if they want, but it’s clear the battle is Flash vs. HTML5 vs. Silverlight. And Microsoft is supporting HTML5 also…

So let me get this straight, the Mac machines that were designed to do all kinds of graphics work, and this that and the other thing, actually suck balls at it, because they are designed to suck that way in favor of the almighty dollar? This Apple bullshit, gets better and better all of the time. No wonder, they have a small market share, in the grand scheme of things.

I am glad Jobs lashed out at Adobe for being lazy. The fact of the matter is, they are lazy. Apple is doing a great thing here, if it wasn’t for them, I bet we might not even see Flash in Android for another 2 years. I don’t have any Apple products, but I’m always mad at the fact that flash on mobile is a POS and Adobe could care less.

Focusing on it more, and yet just recently, they said WM 6.5 lacks certain APIs that they need to develop Flash? Really? They announced Flash for it long time ago, it takes them that long to realize that it doesn’t have all the APIs that they need? I’ll grant you the fact that it was hard for mobile to support flash before, but did you ever think it was because they never worked on using hardware acceleration until recently? There could be initiatives for them to take to make it work better, and they didn’t.

They are lazy, and they are doing a bad job of hiding it too.

I think flash is not safe and makes your computer vulnerable to viruses and hackers, and that is why Apple is not for it. That explains why macs are much more stable than pc’s. You don’t even need an anti virus software for my mac. It has been reported that hackers use flash to hack information from users since pc’s allow flash to penetrate into its OS. Flash is not safe, and it’s not worth the risk for what it offers. I’m a mac user, and I never had this peace of mind until I switched from pc to mac.

Chona, Macs are inherently more secure than Windows PC but a lot of their so called security is due to obscurity. No one runs a Mac, so virus developers don’t waste their time. Events like Pwn to Own have shown quite clearly that Macs are susceptible to hacking as much as PCs. And since Mac users have this sense of security, and little hesitation in going anywhere and clicking anything online, any hack or virus made to target OSX could be very bad. In short, security is due more to obscurity and user intelligence more than anything in the OS.

But on topic, I have never understood the hate for Flash. I have run Flash on every Windows PC I’ve ever owned, on stuff as weak as a 1.2Ghz Athlon XP to my current Intel Core i5 and haven’t had any problems at all. On my i5 machine while watching an SD Hulu stream my CPU utilization was around 4%. I think the problem is purely on Macs. And part of it is due to Adobe, make no mistake. I’m sure if they tried to work with Apple more closely they could get Flash working better. But part of the problem also lies with Apple who has a draconian lockdown on certain APIs that Adobe would normally use to get video working fine. And Apple just snubbing them with the iPhone and iPad just makes Adobe not even want to try.

I wont care, I’ve got a Droid and Windows PC, bring on the Flash and the actual full web (I find of hilarious how Apple likes to brag about how good the iPad browsing experience is, but in their own commercials and press releases they show the NYT with big chunks of it missing with the ugly blue Lego block. You would think they would either choose a site with no Flash, or at least change the broken Flash indicator to something that looks better.)

The test was BS.

You can’t compare Mac vs Windows unless they’re on the same hardware platform. On my MacPro using OS X flash only uses 6% so it wouldn’t be a fair test against the HP. So which MacbookPro was it? The 13inch is no where as good as the 15 or 17 inch units. And what was the CPU? Early model with core duo or a later core 2 duo.

It’s an invalid comparison.

On the windows tests, how can it be a test between the various browser if only one can run HTML5? A pretty stupid test if as it used YouTube, which currently only Google Chrome can run HTML5; and Google Chrome is not brilliant at HTML5 on the Mac. There are other sites that do HTML5 video that the other browsers can run, so why weren’t they used instead of YouTube?

Do the tests properly and then comment, but please don’t comment on this journalistic BS. ( I’m feeling a bit annoyed that many blog sites are using this test to fuel speculation without thinking or checking the test data).

PS. It will be very interesting if the Mac had superior hardware to the HP unit used in the test; as then Apple will have real egg on its face

Disclaimer. I use both Mac & Windows PC’s as development platforms and like them both; they both have their uses.

Never had issues with flash, but I do run both OS Windows and Mac. I will use flash on Windows and HTML5 on my Imac. No big deal to me. Windows remain the dominant platform and I like it that way since no one really writes viruses for the Mac Os unless it starts gaining more in the market. I like the status quo.

What really cracks me up is that whatever Steve Jobs says people just eat it up and regurgitate it. It’s amazing. People learn how to think on your own. Stop defending stupidity. Job calls Adobe lazy and you all agree with him. Has it ever occurred to you that companies get tired of bending over for Steve/Apple just because they want to do things THEIR way? Anyone who doesn’t do what Apple wants is somehow lazy.

Remember when Steve said no apps for the iPhone because he didn’t want to ruin the stability. Then he said ok webapps are the way of the world, so we’ll allow webapps only. Then he changed and went full SDK and real apps on the phone. Through each change in direction fanboys applauded him and continued to compare Windows Mobile explaining how multitasking and on phone software was bad because blah blah blah. Now look at the app store today. My point? Steve Jobs isn’t always right! And that’s why I think there’s always a constant Apple fanboy versus the rest of the world argument on every forum. Because I swear it’s like Mac users are zombies.

> Flash performance is significantly worse as Mac OS X does not provide access to the APIs necessary for GPU acceleration. If Apple opened up the appropriate hooks for Adode to tap into, CPU utilization by Flash could be reduced significantly and its performance would rival that of HTML 5. So yes, Steve, Adobe Flash is a CPU hog but only on the Mac and one of the reasons is because you let it be.

This is bullshit. What do you call OpenCL then?

Okay, the hate is thicker than butterlies flying out the nether parts of Mac fanboys and Apple haters.

Facts are what we need here to make this a rational discussion. One thing the author of this article did not point out that everyone needs to know is this guy Ozer teachers flash classes and writes books on how to use Flash.

Get the connection?

Not that what he’s saying is wrong, or inaccurate. But the fact is, his numbers cannot be trusted as final because he has a financial incentive to put people to use Flash.

What we KNOW, is that Apple does not allow Flash to directly address hardware. Some versions of Windows so with the new 10.1 Flash. But then I’ve never had a problem with Flash working on my Macs for the most part. In fact, my job includes some Actionscript development! So, my job uses Flash, so I’m not a person with an incentive to diss Flash.

But I do hope that some day we can get rid of Flash and use CSS and HTML 5. A lot of our students live in thrid world countries and they could do with more open standards.

And that’s one thing I find strange here. All these people who otherwise would be bashing Adobe over Flash all of a sudden exude hate for people who critcize Flash. Most likely because its an opportunity to slam Apple. How can you tell? Because they are insulting and not worth the time to read. They can’t say things with reason and facts, so they use a priori and straw man attacks. It’s rather pathetic.

I’ve been using a mac for a year now, and the only thing that could completely lock up my system (kernel panics) was flash.

iMacs are a waste of money. Windows 7 is clearly the better platform – better programs, gaming, features, and functionality. Why anyone would pay over 1K for a computer with only 2GB of RAM is beyond me.

This time I believe the fact is that Adobe is lazy.
Think about Linux，the flash performance is also pretty poor on it for a long long time! And Linux is an absolute open source OS! It is just an excuse for lacking APIs.
It is the lazy or other commercial reasons that Adobe didn’t optimize flash for *nix based systems.
Further more, flash is completely a closed platform and HTML5 is completely open. Why support a closed platform to beat down an open platform. If HTML5 is currently not good enough, at least we have approaches to improve it under the eyes of all the people. But for flash, Adobe can say anything to defend themselves’ benefit. We know nothing about internal flash and of course can do nothing to improve it.

Whatever…who cares! we just want flawless access to videos and stuff on the internet…whatever flash or html5.

>Mac OS X does not provide access to the APIs necessary for GPU acceleration.

Someone better explain me how the goddamn Quake Live manages to use GPU acceleration within a Safari window then!

The reason Macs have no viruses is not because the Mac is special, but because UNIX is. OS X is certified by OpenBrand as UNIX 03. The other UNIX 03 operating systems are HP UX, AIX, and Solaris 10. Even if the Mac were obscure, and even if virus writers had never heard of them, if they were to go after any of those operating systems, they’d likely hit all of them.

There are also architectural reasons. There’s no registry for malware to hide in, so malware can’t play Jenga with your system by messing it up. System process can’t produce a UI. A virus can’t get into the actual system without knowing an administrator password and knowing how to type. (Windows Vista and 7 have that last characteristic.)

Most Mac users are also Windows users, so when they explain why they hate Windows, they give technical reasons. A much smaller proportion of Windows users are also Mac users, so when Windows users explain why they hate OS X, they refer to us obnoxious fan boys. (Just own a Mac and everyone accuses you of being a fanboy, so you might as well go all the way.)

The people who are motivated to write malware for Windows know how to do it, while the people who are motivated to write malware for the Mac doe’t know how.

The result? No viruses for UNIX, therefore none for the Mac, and very few of the other kinds of malware.

Guys let’s face it flash is here to stay. I have a Dell studio and flash works like a charm not a single problem. And if u really want flash on ur iPhone then hack it. It’s not that hard my iPhone has flash. And mr job let’s not forget about ur lepord os which we all know what happened with that. Do don’t see pc doing that. Job stop being selfish.

HTML5 just isn’t there yet.

I recently experimented with using CSS3 animations (because that would eventually have to replace flash graphically) on Apple’s own iPad page.

My version uses CSS3 animations instead of scripaculous effects and only works in Chrome / Safari.

http://www.visualmedia.nl/html5/ipad/

CPU usage is around 40% with both solutions.