iPad

[Cyrrex]

I hear that 9 out of 10 grandmothers prefer multitasking in their internet enabled devices.  And flash.

[Baldrake]

My wife, who is not at all computer-savvy but who is considering buying an iPad, had heard about the flash issue. She has no idea what flash is, but is concerned about it. The media impact of this is broader (by at least one person) than I expected.

[Samwise]

She'd understand what it meant the first time she went to a flash-required website and got the blue box of denial.  (Or at least she'd feel the pain -- the browser doesn't actually tell you that the problem is lack of Flash support.)  It's good practice for the site to offer an HTML alternative in case the browser doesn't support Flash, but that doesn't mean every site does it.  There have been a number of instances with my iPod where I wanted to look up some info on, say, a restaurant's website, and I couldn't load the site because it was all in Flash, or had a short Flash intro at the beginning that was supposed to redirect to the real site.

[Righ]

a short Flash intro at the beginning that was supposed to redirect to the real site.

I hate that. Some of them aren't short either.

http://www.tr-i.com/

That said, I prefer my web browsers to support all the crap that people use, just in case I somehow need it. Maybe Google can make a browser for Apple's devices and sue for anti-competitive behaviour when Apple blocks the app. :)

[KallDrexx]

That said, I prefer my web browsers to support all the crap that people use, just in case I somehow need it. Maybe Google can make a browser for Apple's devices and sue for anti-competitive behaviour when Apple blocks the app. :)

Opera supposedly has an iphone browser pending approval

[Lantyssa]

Would you like Chocolate, Vanilla, Mint, or iPad?

[sigil]

Mmmm aluminum dust! 

[Mrbloodworth]

Sorry, I don't get the flash hate, not with how much it has improved the Internets.

Its apple/mac/Linux that is the problem, not flash.

[Lantyssa]

It's how Flash is often used, unnecessarily, because the web designer heard that you have to make everything in Flash.  It's like using large point blinking text just because you can.

[Mrbloodworth]

It's how Flash is often used, unnecessarily, because the web designer heard that you have to make everything in Flash.  It's like using large point blinking text just because you can.

And you will continue to find that forever with anything.

[Tarami]

Flash is just a necessary evil. Just like HTML, CSS, HTTP, parts of JavaScript and the entire DOM API. Flash is somewhat unique however since its shortcomings are often experienced by the users, while the others can (largely) be managed by the developer.

Thing is, Flash isn't the elephant in the room any more than most of the other things that are used on the web. Developers (web ones especially) tend to go into a frantic circlejerk over standards but the truth is that the standards, even if implemented well, typically blow. CSS is acceptable for simple styling but abysmal for layout (please center this variable-sized box on both axes. The CSS3 spec is just embarrassing. Rounded corners, wooo!) HTML as a concept is just wrong (you can't seperate layout and semantics with HTML, no matter how much W3C wants us think so. You just can't.) HTTP was fine for sending static pages back when mankind used to bang rocks together to make fire, but since people started working around that limitation, the shortcomings have become numerous. AJAX, Comet, polling (short or long) are all hacks to make a stateless protocol more stateful. Ironically, Flash is also almost unique in the sense that very little needs to be done to actually have it run in multiple browsers (embedding, mostly.)

My point is, Jobs should ban the entire web if he's concerned over hackjobs. He isn't, though, or Apple would have their own project (FappleLight, maybe?) to deal with the problem domain that Flash covers. HTML5 isn't a solution, it's just a side (or down-)grade to take Adobe out of the equation. It can grow into something pretty cool, but we're many, many years away from the point where Flash games of today can be produced in HTML5. Flash isn't slow, insecure or whatever because it's not Apple, but because of its capabilities. Simply put, you aren't going to get Flash-but-without-the-problems. The best one can hope for is really Flash-with-a-few-problems-less.

[Morfiend]

I wish I could find a good reason to buy one.

[Quinton]

The biggest issue with flash is that its architecture makes it really hard to accelerate with modern hardware.  Adobe is franticly trying to improve this in recent version updates, but it's still a mess.  With larger displays (a lot more pixels to touch), purely software scene rendering does not scale well, and having to have software touch pixels that your hardware video codec generates causes a lot of overhead, cache thrash, etc.

Modern OS and browser design can sandbox things pretty well (I believe the chrome guys run flash in a separate process container to limit the security and stability impact, for example).

Playing a fullscreen video with no "chrome" on a modern ARM SoC with hardware h264/mpeg codec or dsp support (as all of the popular SoCs have -- Apple's A4 is not special here) is an extremely low power operation, requiring the CPU to run for very tiny periods of time every few frames or once a frame worst case.  Introducing a software render step on top of that (as flash apps often do) can take you from CPU idle 99% of the time (power determined by battery size, display/backlight power cost and codec) to CPU running 50% or more of the time which starts to seriously impact battery life.

[Tarami]

Yes, Flash is comparatively slow and without detailed knowledge of the inner workings of Flash, I have no problems believing that Flash could be improved/replaced in many ways, it's just that sticking your head in the sand isn't going to help. Like I said, build your own RIA container like Microsoft is doing, work with Adobe to produce a subset player (that isn't a stand-alone app like the YouTube app), just do SOMETHING other than saying "X sucks because I say so, we're going to simply ignore that everyone wants it."

I'm being a bit harsh here, but presumably you get my drift. It's corporate arrogance at its worst.

[Quinton]

Android's getting flash.  Chrome's got flash.  Even though it's a pain in the butt, Google's working with Adobe to make it go, because hey, there's a lot of flash content out there and people want it to work... I mean hell, how am I going to watch Strongbad Emails on my phone otherwise?

[Tarami]

Indeed, my nerdrage was rather specifically directed at Apple/Jobs. I'm a fan of design purity, if it's for technical people. If it's consumer devices, I expect things to... well, work as expected.

[Quinton]

Yeah, I remain torn on this one.  Flash is pretty terrible and I'd love to see it die and leave us all in peace, but fundamentally I believe in open platforms, and I think Steve actively banning it is a greater evil.

Note open platforms, not necessarily open source. It's far more important to me that computing platforms have no barrier to app development and deployment than that the source for everything be available -- platform source is a nice to have, open platform is a fundamental requirement for a modern computer, in my mind.

It's unclear if you could even ship a third party ipod/ipad browser with flash, due to the rules against embedded languages (hell, depending on how you parse that any web browser would be disallowed due to javascript...).

[naum]

Android's getting flash.  Chrome's got flash.  Even though it's a pain in the butt, Google's working with Adobe to make it go, because hey, there's a lot of flash content out there and people want it to work... I mean hell, how am I going to watch Strongbad Emails on my phone otherwise?

Trend is not good for Flash. It's not going to disappear entirely but we already are seeing it phased out in lieu of (a) H.264 for video which will play on the millions of iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads natively in the browser and (b) javascript library frameworks which supplant Flash for the little fade out slideshow animated image banners. And Apple is a big part of that, like it or not. There's no reason that Strongbad can't be encoded as H.264 and playable on the iPhone, though it's doubtful old repositories will be converted. Eventually, though, H.264 is going to be the lingua franca of web video, with Flash a historic footnote, just like RealPlayer/RealMedia before it, and the never to be nascent ogg theora format.

Flash sucks. It runs horribly on any other platform (Apple, Linux and most mobile devices) than a modern Windows OS machine, and if  you haven't noticed, unlike 10 years ago, that market is too large to ignore and relegate support to no longer homogenous tidings.

Even Google is opting for HTML 5 (judging from those that work there and there efforts in advancing HTML 5 standards, whereas Adobe is doing their best to delay/stall) and only resorting to Flash as a fallback.

[Engels]

Call me Mr. Tinfoil Headcase, but I suspect the flash blockade by Apple has far more to do with ITunes as a content portal than any real concern about Flash's processing needs. The thing that I don't think Job's has thought through is that if the iPad gets enough marketshare, the 'free content' stuff, such as Hulu, will just transcribe their content into iPad compatible formats. It may take a couple of years, but the internets is faster and more agile than Apple, Microsoft or any one behemoth.

[Quinton]

Google's definitely heavily invested in HTML5.  I'd agree that Flash has questionable future, but right now there's still a lot of flash content out there and it seems worthwhile to support it if possible.  Because, at the end of the day, users just want the websites they visit to work, no matter what device they use to surf the web.

[Tarami]

Problem is that people keep talking about Flash as if playing video was the only thing it did. Yes, it is used a lot for video playback, but sites like Kongregate have found some minor uses for it too. Video is the easy part to solve. HTML5's true multimedia capability will likely be pretty crap for years to come.

There's another thing concerning HTML5 which is true for all open standards - feature creep. Mozilla will add a couple of features, so will Google, Microsoft is going to add a tonne (because that's their m.o. - "screw standards"), Apple a couple of others et c. until HTML5 is as motley as CSS. For better or for worse, this isn't the case with Flash. I feel opening the browser to multimedia (the nineties are back!) is opening a can of worms: there's so much to do that different browser vendors will make different decisions on what to implement.

The HTML5 spec, as it is, isn't powerful or flexible enough to replace Flash, it's going to need a whole swab of proprietary extensions to be useable as a real platform. Right now it's just a couple of novelty features that makes certain things sorta-kinda-almost viable.

Engels,
it's a theory many people subscribe to in all honesty. It's in-character somehow.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yes, Flash is comparatively slow

Negative, its slow on machines that intentional restrict access to hardware and other resources. Anything else, is just bad code/use of flash itself. We are not talking VM's here. 

[naum]

Yes, Flash is comparatively slow

Negative, its slow on machines that intentional restrict access to hardware and other resources. Anything else, is just bad code/use of flash itself. We are not talking VM's here. 

Bullshit.

As subpar (compared to Windows) as Flash runs on the Apple platform, it's even worse on Linux where there is nearly no "restricted access to hardware and other resources" — where we're looking at the same hardware, but a Penguin instead of Microsoft Bob (or whatever the old clippy animation was).

Regarding web usage of Flash — yes, video is far from the only thing that Flash does, but it's the main usage of Flash on the web. Though other application usages are just as affected…

* …animated image banners — easily done with JS frameworks like jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, YUI, etc.… …and if you hadn't noticed, new site refreshes are dumping the flash in lieu of JS solutions.

* …games — yeah, not going away immediately, but I suspect HTML 5 will supplant this too — if Quake can be written in HTML 5, I'm sure most of the silly Flash games can be too. Also, the biggest FB game maker, Zynga, is eagerly porting its games to the iPad/iPhone platform.

* …other — documents? Audio? These are subpar web alternatives even today.

[Baldrake]

So how does Silverlight fit in this whole equation?

[bhodi]

So how does Silverlight fit in this whole equation?

It doesn't. No one but microsoft likes it and trying to get people to install some activex plugin to even get it to work is like pulling teeth.

[KallDrexx]

So how does Silverlight fit in this whole equation?

It doesn't. No one but microsoft likes it and trying to get people to install some activex plugin to even get it to work is like pulling teeth.

Except netflix, and the olympics, and quite a bit of other big organizations..........

[Engels]

Ya, I too didn't have too much trouble with Silverlight, either in IE8 or Chrome.

[Trippy]

iPad teardown:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1

A4 teardown (!):

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple-A4-Teardown/2204/1

[Baldrake]

So how does Silverlight fit in this whole equation?

It doesn't. No one but microsoft likes it and trying to get people to install some activex plugin to even get it to work is like pulling teeth.

Except netflix, and the olympics, and quite a bit of other big organizations..........

What I was really wondering was whether the iPad permits Silverlight...

Fake edit: Or I could just Google it...

[Trippy]

iPad doesn't like sunlight:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_gadg/20100406/tc_ytech_gadg/ytech_gadg_tc1486

[Tarami]

A4 teardown (!):

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple-A4-Teardown/2204/1

Cool!

And hey, get off Silverlight, it's pretty darn cool when compared to Flash.

Regarding web usage of Flash — yes, video is far from the only thing that Flash does, but it's the main usage of Flash on the web. Though other application usages are just as affected…

* …animated image banners — easily done with JS frameworks like jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, YUI, etc.… …and if you hadn't noticed, new site refreshes are dumping the flash in lieu of JS solutions.

* …games — yeah, not going away immediately, but I suspect HTML 5 will supplant this too — if Quake can be written in HTML 5, I'm sure most of the silly Flash games can be too. Also, the biggest FB game maker, Zynga, is eagerly porting its games to the iPad/iPhone platform.

* …other — documents? Audio? These are subpar web alternatives even today.

The Quake 2 port wasn't written in HTML5, which was exactly my point. It was written using a HTML5 Canvas and a number of other technologies that aren't actually part of the specification, like WebSockets and WebGL, neither of which in turn have finalized specifications. Hell, even HTML5 isn't a W3C recommendation yet. This is the feature creep I'm speaking of - vendors throwing stuff in there hoping to appeal to developers, resulting in browser-specific apps and aggravating the already significant issue of browser incompatability.

Secondly, we're talking browser adaptation for HTML5 to work commercially, something history tells us is insanely slow. It's not a matter of just getting the technology out the door, it'll be years before it has reached enough desktops to be considered exclusively. The reason JavaScript has gained such a foothold the past 4-5 years is because it's supported relatively well all the way back to IE6 (XMLHTTP mostly), it has just been neglected. The beauty of a plug-in like Flash is again that plug-ins have been supported in some form since the dawn of time, it doesn't require the user to upgrade his or her browser, it's just an additional download. It has a played a large part in the success of Flash that it has worked fairly well almost regardless of browser. Maybe someone should write an ActiveX-plugin for HTML5 support?

Flash is likely going to go away sooner or later, but my belief is that it'll be around for several years still, because the end users like it (not that most know the difference, they just like the content Flash gives them.) HTML5 needs to be much better at doing what Flash is doing before people in general will care. I don't see that an essentially lamer but "standards compliant" API is going to ursurp Flash because geeks think it should.

[naum]

Flash is likely going to go away sooner or later, but my belief is that it'll be around for several years still, because the end users like it (not that most know the difference, they just like the content Flash gives them.) HTML5 needs to be much better at doing what Flash is doing before people in general will care. I don't see that an essentially lamer but "standards compliant" API is going to ursurp Flash because geeks think it should.

The discussion about standards is of tertiary concern. Standards are never going to be universal. All that needs to happen is that it works "good enough". Even today, with the standard in flux, new sites and site refreshes are popping up using HTML 5 even if they have to use 3 separate CSS properties to round corners, declare background opacity, etc.…

I'm not talking of the theoretical, I'm referring to what is happening right now, circa 2010 in web site development. Flash is incrementally being discarded or kept as a graceful fallback. It's already occurring with the annoying epilepsy inducing flashing banners and it's starting now with video where video tags are going to be used and Flash just a fallback for IE browsers (and older browsers). Google is headed that way. Apple is already there. Everyone else is going to follow, Microsoft and Adobe be damned.

[Lantyssa]

iPad doesn't like sunlight:

Over at The Next Web, meanwhile, there's a tale from an iPad user in Texas who says his iPad shut down after "a little over an hour" in the great outdoors: "I let it sit for a minute or two, then it happened again maybe 30 minutes later."

It'll be functionally useless outdoors all along the Gulf Coast for nine months out of the year.  Awesome.

[Quinton]

Apparently they do thermal shutdown at 35C, which seems pretty low.

[Righ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NMThbkuf6E