Blogs Does Flash Really Sap Your iPhone Battery?

So, flash saps your battery like the antenna problem was a software issue?

Reckon Apple would change their tune if Adobe said "no Adobe products on Apple"
Would they loose like, 8-10% profit? Marketshare favours the PC.

 

100% Correct.

Currently video is part of the DisplayList in Flash, which gpu's don't like. So, in Flash 10.2 they have a new api that decouples the video from the DisplayList. Basically right now the video engine runs inside the vector rendering engine, whereas the new api separates and layers the vector rendering engine on top - giving massive benefits - You can google for a video demo from Max.

 

Well Flash runs seamlessly on my HTC Desire HD (after all the Apple BS I have to say I was surprised), just like it runs flawlessly on my PC. People should remember that it isn't just a video delivery system either, games, interactive websites, e-learning and much much more... Blocking the videos of millions of sites and all of their "rich" content "on behalf of their customers" (what a joke), is not what I look for when I buy a product.

I cannot believe there is so much apparent support for their locked down system where everything you consume comes with at least 30% cut for Apple.... I swear half the comments on the technology sites come from Apple shareholders.

I will NEVER buy Apple products until they change their ways, always remember it was the apple that got us kicked out of the (non-walled) garden...

 

So what is "writing" an article that is only reporting on another article which is bad journalism?

 

There's no point in banning a program because 'it makes my device look bad'.

What they should be doing is (privately) voicing the concerns with the software developers, getting a positive line of communication going and help them identify the issues and implement updates that overcome the issue at hand.

The alternative is a press slanging match and the developer waking up each morning thinking of new ways to make the device look worse than it already is

.....it's hardly rocket science.

 

Apple have been trying to get a version of flash working on the iphone for ages. Steve jobs has been quoted multiple times saying "give me a version of flash that can perform as fast as a desktop version and we will put it in. Adobe has yet to come back to us". Even non apple phones that boasted flash support have trouble getting it to run.

They've obviously given adobe the chance.

Apple (like many others), are seeing adobe flash for what it is. A dying technology. HTML5 can already do 95% of what flash can without the big processing overhead and the need for a closed source plugin. Many websites are already making this change. New york times, aviary.com for a couple of examples.

 

Adobe is a locked down system. You can't develop for it without buying their overpriced flash suite. Why bother supporting and paying for a closed system when you can opt for HTML5 for free?

Fair enough apple takes 30% but developers for the iphone still make a massive profit. For that 30% their apps get shown in the app store. Something that millions of people browse everyday. It's like free publicity. How much do you think a developer would spend on internet marketing to get traffic to their website about a game? The reason it is closed is to give you a consistent experience. I agree that apple can be very black and white about what they allow on their devices, but it works.

Angry birds has always been 59p. Look how much money the developers made. Obviously a lot since the game has now moved to andriod, osx and windows. Oh and a board game is on the way!

I'm not an apple fan boy. I have an iphone but i've also had andriod phones too. There's just so much more choice on the iphone. Games running unreal engine 3? Dead space in your pocket? Yes please!

 

Control freaks! That is all they are there should be more choice, but hey, apple are shite. Actually let me rephrase that: Steve Jobs is shite, may he burn in hell. It's a shame the Woz left

 

Flash, (Adobe is a company), is not a locked down system, please don't continue to spout the lies Jobs spread. You can indeed develop Flash content using any number of products, including notepad if necessary. Moreover the content you develop can be distributed any way you like, Adobe will never take a cut! Nearly all the specs of the Flash Player have been open sourced and released and the ones that haven't primarily deal with the streaming of copyrighted content. Moreover it costs NOTHING for the end user. The next version of Flash Player already in testing has a much improved 3D engine, support for stereoscopic 3D video and more, it's death has been greatly exaggerated....

The iPhone is a locked in closed platform, made in sweatshops where the workers are committing suicide due to the conditions. It is not the future of technology I want to see and will not be entering (or supporting) that garden thanks....

 

The problem isn't the video-formats used, the problem is the flash-application itself.

You notice the bad performance of the flash-plugin even on a normal PC.

And what is flash good for anyways? Annoying banners and menus or whole webpages that can't be indexed?

I used flash heavily myself in webdesign some 5 to 10 years ago, but nowadays I only do CSS and basic javascript for designing the same pages.

As soon as webbrowsers will natively support media-playback without any plugins needed, flash will die anyways.

 

well said jrs. Flash has been overtaken by javascript, CSS and HTML5. any website that still uses Flash is loosing visitors by the day.

FlashBlock plugin is available on all browsers, and i urge everyone to use it. it will save you a lot of crash, bother and energy. it really is the best plugin ever made. unlike Adblock where it blocks off ad revenue for great sites such as Bit-tech, Flashblock only blocks processor hogging, battery sapping adverts, leaving non-intrusive Google advert in place for you to click and to support websites.



i wish Flash a quick death. no one will miss the time wasting facebook games, no one will miss its generated browser crash and no one will miss flashy adverts. its sole purpose is to serve videos which can be done by better standards and thus Flash will never be missed. But it's like Internet Explorer, everyone know it's horrible, but its death will be painfully slow

 

And I suppose the millions of handsets sold by HTC and other companies that use andriod and windows phone 7 are manufactured in any better conditions?

Fair enough aspects of Flash are open source but you still rely on a flash plugin made by Adobe. Even on PC's and Macs, flash is one of the major causes of browser crashes,slowdowns and security flaws. Web development technology changes constantly and Apple have just put it's money on HTML5 and CSS3 coming out on top. Flash was created when browsers weren't designed to handle mulitmedia content. It's done it's job brilliantly but we're at the stage now where everything on the web can be developed with fully open source languages such as HTML5/CSS3 which are native to the browser.

But I agree with you. If you don't like a company then don't buy their products. Each to their own!

+1 to jrs77

 

Incorrect. Apple has always been keen to support HTML5 instead. There is nothing that can be done in Flash that cannot be done in HTML5. Including games. They run on iPhone just fine --for free, without intervention of the App Store, straight from the browser. So that it not the reason.

Moreover Apple does not set the prices of apps on the App Store; the publisher does. If someone wants to port their Flash game to iPhone/iPod Touch for free, they can do so. If they don't it is because they want to make a buck.

Of course, whether Flash or HTML5, those games rely on internet connectivity. App-based games do not, because they are installed locally. Hey, come to think of it, perhaps that's why we have apps: to have instant functionality that does not depend on bandwidth and access through a web browser.

It is what Mozilla has been doing. The Skype toolbar was banned basically because it caused so many crashes and they were concerned that people would blame the Firefox browser.

Without Steve Jobs PCs would still be beige boxes and Windows 7 would look like Windows 2000. Our Smartphones would look like the old Blackberry's or the Palm Treo. MP3 players would be like the Creative Nomad and you'd need to be a computer geek to use them. For most people that would be a problem.

Steve made Apple a massive business success. You can find his brainchildren everywhere: it made geekware accessible to the masses. Just because he does it in a way that offends your personal desire to hack and mod things does not make him a bad person.

 

Do you remember...

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981

I'm glad there's still visionary people in the business like Steve.

 

Was going to post exactly that. The problem with Apple is not what you can/cannot do and how it results, the problem is that no decision is yours.

 

You are wrong. If you want flash don't buy an iPhone. That decision is yours.

 

+1

It's not that you wouldn't know about the product you're buying.

 

Except that most people buying Apple products WONT know, in fact Apple even removed the small lego logo that told people that the content was there but not accessible, now it just shows up as a blank box (so people will think the website is broken and not their device).

As I mentioned Flash runs fine on my Android mobile device, so all the arguments regarding its performance are clearly bogus.

As for html5's capabilities it is irrelevant as 60% of people accessing the internet are doing so using browsers that cannot access html5 content, as opposed to Flash which around 97% of people can view.

Even so, I should point out that the html5 specs aren't even finalised, the implementations vary wildly between the browsers that do support it, and for video alone there is a huge split in the capable browsers as to what formats they can or will support. Not to mention the fact that no one has produced a decent development environment for html5 yet either....

Moreover, no one is going to retro code every single piece of Flash content out there already.

I am glad you are ok with having content actively blocked from your device by the manufacturer, but you shouldn't expect everyone to feel the same way.

Where is this mindless support for having content blocked coming from, clearly it is better to have access to content than not, and it should be up to the guy who owns the device not the one running the company that made it.

 

Time to dispel some myths...

Flash and HTML5 are comparable
Well, yes and no...When people compare Flash and HTML5 they mean Flash vs. HTML5/CSS3/Javascript.

HTML5 will mean the end of annoying, cpu-hogging adverts
Haha! Not on your nelly...The reason flash is used for those all-singing, all-dancing adverts is because flash is currently the only real option for creating them. They'll be just as annoying in HTML5...They'll hog just as much cpu in HTML5 (if not more because HTML5 wont have gpu rendering for yeeeaaars).

HTML5 will mean my browser won't crash
Again, no...Just as in Flash it won't be the platform that's to blame, but lazy developers who don't dump extraneous variables. I'm sure some of you are old enough to remember the early days of the web, where badly programmed javascript caused constant browser crashes...Well, that could be the case again, and what are you going to use then? HTML5Block? lol

Flash can't be indexed
uhh... yes it can http://www.flashnseo.com/category/flash-experiments/

Flash is closed source
The .fla format (the compile time format for Adobes flash editor) is closed source. However the .swf format (the flash player runtime format) is open-source. There are several other Flash IDEs out there...they just don't use the .fla format, but export .swfs just as well. The flash player itself is open-source, you can hack it any way you want...but it isnt generally done because you'd then have to distribute your version of the player.

Develpers would prefer to do away with Flash
Hell no, with HTML you have to ensure that your page will run on all the different rendering engines...the most important being Trident (Microsoft), Gecko (Mozilla), Webkit (Apple & Google) and Presto (Opera). Flash, on the other hand is a single runtime that behaves the same over 98% of browsers. Not only that, but you can take your flash application and with minimal modification distribute it as a desktop app (through AIR) or as a mobile app (including the iPhone). HTML5 is likely to be as it has always been - Fragmentation masquerading as Standardisation.

My Personal opinion
Flash and HTML will happily co-exist for years to come (just as they have for the last 15) because they each have their pros and cons for different scenarios. Things will go on as they always have...Dum dee dum...Sorry that isn't as exciting or dramatic as a flame war...

Any questions?

 

But were talking about flash on a mobile device. iPhones safari supports html5 just fine. The reason why most people are still unable to use html5 is due to the fact that they are stuck with an old version of ie which Microsoft has only started improving since firefox,chrome and safari came onto the scene.

Html5 may not yet be finalised, but web devs and big sites are already updating their sites with html5 functionality. It's the natural evolution of web standards. I think Steve jobs sees this like many other developers do.

Granted you can complain about the choice being taken away from you. But I'm a heavy net user and tech geek and I get by just fine without it. Need a utube video? No problem. Want to watch game trailers on my fav gaming site? No problem they have a mobile site with videos that don't require flash. Im willing to lose flash to have thousands of free games and applications at my fingertips. With the added knowledge that my mobile browser is future proof when HTML5 takes over.