Dont want Flash

Adobe's Flash and Acrobat have 'critical' vulnerability, may allow remote hijacking

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 02:45:15 -0400

Adobe's Flash and Acrobat have 'critical' vulnerability, may allow remote hijacking:

When Adobe said Flash gives you the full web experience, it meant it. Part and parcel of the web, as we all know, is the good old hacking community, which has been “actively exploiting” a vulnerability in Flash Player 10.0.45.2 (and earlier versions) and Adobe Acrobat and Reader 9.x to overtake people’s machines and do hacky stuff with them. This so-called flaw also causes crashes, but that’s probably not what’s worrying you right now. [Engadget]

Adobe CEO not making any sense

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:25:57 -0400

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/?mod=wsj_share_digg

What I find interesting after watching this video, most of it is the Adobe CEO yapping on about how “innovative” and “wonderful” CS5 is. I realised that the CEO has missed something…

He’s talking about how Flash bridges the gap between multiple OS’ and device platforms but that always requires the Flash Plugin to be available. This is also mentioned with the now over used word “open” but I dont see how have a proprietary plugin is any form of open.

Delivering a rich multimedia experience usually means video and animations but doesn’t HTML5 provide this? So why do we need Flash?

Surely all devices need to do is keep up with the HTML5 spec and that will be the most open and efficient tool available that is available on all platforms, plugin or not.

It’s an interesting oversight by Adobe that they aren’t using these actual open standards that are truely multi-platform without the need for a plugin. Where’s the Publish tool to go to HTML5?

In the end, Adobe is a business and they are in it for the money. Flash costs considerably more to buy to be able to author multimedia content when HTML5 is free.

"Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t..."

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:08:00 -0400

“

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

”

- Steve Jobs’ thoughts on Flash

"Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it..."

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:25:14 -0400

“Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.”

- Sharing the truth one thread at a time (via @chimpocalypse) (via oliyoung)

"We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately..."

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:09:53 -0400

“We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.”

- Steve Jobs replying to emails regarding “Section 3.3.1” in the Developer License Agreement.

This is one of my main points behind why Flash should not exist on mobile. It just acts as another layer that increases the amount of bugs, glitches, crashes, hold ups and loss of performance for a mobile device.

"Any Flash Developers that want to develop iPhone Applications but now are lost, I have a..."

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:42:51 -0400

“

Any Flash Developers that want to develop iPhone Applications but now are lost, I have a solution.

Stop whining and learn Objective-C! Go make an iPhone app, the native way.

Why restrict yourself to 1 platform, 1 coding language when you can enrich your portfolio and learn a new and better language.

It’s not about how Apple stopped Adobe from making a cross-compiler. Its about how one-eyed and lazy Flash Developers are. They need to grow up, stop suckling Adobe’s teet and go expand their skill set!

”

- Me, Alex Eckermann.

Theories why Apple doesn't want Flash

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:25:00 -0400

After all the hype this morning and the delivery of the iPhone OS 4.0 preview there were some interesting posts and comments made about the Apple v. Flash debate.

Conspiracy theories and thoughts about why Apple don’t want Flash on the iPhone range from the rational to the big company domination points of view. I see myself being more rational about these theories. Some I have come across don’t seem right.

Adobe want to lock developers into Flash and commoditize everything else as Flash-delivery devices. Apple want to commoditize applications and lock developers into their APIs.

via YCominator Comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250946

I put this comment in the “big company domination” conspiracy category. Sure Apple is a big company that has a lot of control over technology and the mobile space. However, just because they are big doesn’t mean they are evil.

Iv’e said it many times why Flash and the iPhone OS don’t mix, it comes down to performance. In the keynote this morning Steve made a key point of why they don’t use Flash, in an indirect manner.

Whilst demoing the iAd service he mentioned that the Ad’s when you opened them are HTML5 and are animated with effects. The preview showed off some pretty good animations with effects like shadows and light sources. I believe this is the reason that Flash isn’t on the iPhone, HTML5 does it better.

Why would Apple go and get in bed with Adobe when it can use true open standards and use a language that the native OS can support and optimise. Plus lets not forget that to generally build Flash executables you need Flash CS5 and that costs money when a text editor and some knowledge can get you a HTML5 page for free.

In closing, what Apple is doing is supporting HTML5 which is a more open standard plus it’s free to develop and can be controlled by the system for better performance. Simple as that.

Edit: I skewed off at the end a little bit. When mentioning HTML5 I was talking about why the iAd service uses HTML5 for making Adverts. I combined 2 bits of rage I had at the time of posting this. But at the beginning I think I was clear in saying that the views that Apple is trying to dominate are the ramblings of idiots. Its more a case of Apple looking after the user and making sure their experience is free of flaws and bugs in turn selling more devices thanks to verbal referrals from HAPPY users.

Adobe reports 7mil page requests to download Flash from iPhone OS devices

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:52:00 -0500

Doherty notes that by December 2009, as many as 7 million iPhone users had tried to download Flash. Figures had reached 3 million by June of that year.

Source: iPodNN

I found out about this statistic about a month ago, didn’t think much of it. This morning @bjango tweeted some perspective on this statistic that I wanted to share.

Perspective:
7mil = ~10% of all iPhone/iPod owners attempting once.
7mil = ~0.02% of all app downloads.

Source: @bjango

Those figures add up pretty well when you combine iPhone and iPod Touch sales.

I know I have gone to that page, by accident. I wanted to see if a site had a Quicktime version of a video and in the process I clicked on a “Please install Flash” badge. I didn’t want to go there but I did. There’s no way of determining how many of those 7 million wanted to go to the Adobe site. Im sure you could kill a few 10-100 thousand visits because of misdirection or a forced redirect.

10% in comparison to the whole iPhone OS base is not much. It would look like 90% of iPhone OS user’s are either informed about the Flash and iPhone OS situation or just don’t need Flash on their mobile device. Knowing that most, if not all, Flash embed objects on the web have some type of “Download Flash here” fallbacks in place. This is a low figure and actually may show that people maybe don’t care about Flash?

Just an example of how information can be hidden from you. When you know the proportion of the metrics at play then you will know the truth.

"Matthew Dempsky has discovered a bug which will crash the Flash player on every supported platform...."

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:48:00 -0500

“Matthew Dempsky has discovered a bug which will crash the Flash player on every supported platform. That might not seem like a huge deal, except that he discovered this bug in September of 2008 and has reported it to Adobe, which hasn’t fixed it yet.”

- 16 month-old bug continues to crash Flash, TUAW

If this is how long it takes Adobe to fix a crashing bug then how long will it take to update an exploit? With our mobile devices containing high amounts of personal data do we really want to risk having it available because of an exploit not fixed for months?

An interesting conversation

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:32:54 -0500

An interesting conversation broke out on twitter between a co-worker @keithpitt and a user @JarZ.

@JarZ: But breaking compatibility with many, many websites by omitting flash is just silly and unnecessary, imo.

We’ll thats not the devices fault. As a web developer myself, whenever I have to use Flash I always have a fallback. Since recently everything had Flash some people got slack and didn’t set these fallbacks. It’s not the fault of the device but of the web developer, the lack of foresight and testing.

@JarZ: Because plenty of web pages are broken without flash. Even apples launch of the ipad suffered from that when showing NYT page

Suffered? I wouldn’t call a blue Lego suffering. Im pretty sure Steve knew that would happen, because they do rehearsing. Plenty are broken? Not really, plenty may have components or bits that are broken but please see the comment before regarding fallbacks.

@JarZ: but making up other excuses is bullshit. It’s not crashy/slow/etc on other mobile devices. Why is apple so different?

Sure other devices have Flash, although this being Flash Lite. Hey and you cant deny the stats. Apple reported that on Safari, most crashes were by plug-ins including Flash.

@JarZ: seriously, it’s a business decision, nothing more. Apple are welcome to make that decision on their own products.

Apple is a Business. Im sure it was a business decision. I detect a little emotion in this tweet. Probably trying to make Apple feel like this juggernaut exterminating technologies in its wake. Including Adobe in the development cycle of the devices a) would have cost more time b) meant a 3rd hand in the pie c) possible agreements and contracts which will fall through when we switch to HTML5.

@JarZ: if my n900 with its 600mhz arm coretex a8 can run flash fine, i dont see why apple can’t support it

Im sure any Apple device can handle Flash too. But that’s not the point. How often would you use Flash on a mobile device? Maybe for video, a few times a month? Well there are better and more supported methods of delivering video, one of them is HTML5. For such little use its just not worth the effort.

@JarZ: i believe the only reason that apple is not allowing flash is because it would take too many sales away from the app store

You’re absolutely correct and wrong. Yes if Flash games were on the iPhone then developers could be able to make games on Flash and distribute for free. But what if that same developer made a native iPhone app, then he/she could make money from that application. Also, from what I have read and understand about Flash (as a developer) is that it cant do multitouch, a big fail for gaming on these devices.

Im going to leave it there. Im sorry @JarZ but most of the comments are just not researched. Im sure you love Flash for video’s and such but patience will in turn reap its spoils with HTML5 coverage.

From what I can gather about this. The public want Flash for Video. Well it’s going to move from Flash to other technologies in a year or so. It’s worth the wait and why support Flash for it only to be gone in 2011?

Sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream, Qik and many others all either have iPhone Applications or HTML5 alternatives that work on non-Flash devices.

"Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. […] Whenever a Mac crashes more often..."

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:39:32 -0500

“Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. […] Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash.”

- Steve Jobs, CEO Apple

Well I think that just about sums up the debate here.

[Wired]

[FormSpring] What about Farmville?

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:44:52 -0500

The first FormSpring question.

If Farmville wants to hit the mobile market it could. If I was them I would build a web application built for mobiles. Using Javascript for animations and any basic effects. Although its worth remembering the device we are dealing with here.

Mobiles dont have a lot of graphical ompfh nor not a lot of memory. So Farmville Lite would be a good option.

It’s up to the developers and owners of Farmville to decide what they want to do. But making a light and mainly text based option would be best for them to start from. Then as graphics and memory is improved, so can their application.

[POLL] Why do you want Flash?

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:36:14 -0500

[POLL] Why do you want Flash?:

Can anyone visiting that still wants Flash on the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices answer this poll.

Im gathering information and trying to find out what the people want.

Flash test results and why it shouldn't be mobile

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:57:05 -0500

I did a test to see how consuming Flash was on a computer.

Now it would be wrong of me to just blatantly say “You’re battery will die before the video ends” when using Flash on a mobile device. I know Flash would have a cut down version for mobile, I know that.

So we cant really compare these results outright. But lets not totally throw out the test. It’s an indication.

But there is one thing I have to point out, its obvious but overlooked. Flash is made by Adobe, the iPhone and iPad are made by Apple. Apple knows how to get the best efficiency out of their device, Adobe doesn’t.

It’s like getting a mechanic that specialises in Ferrari’s to go and do maintenance on a Porsche. Sure the job would be done but it wouldn’t be efficient.

Using Flash on mobile would chew through your battery. Watching video’s would be worse because of the fetching via cellular network and outputting of the video itself. It’s just not right. So at the end of a day you would go to ring your mates only to find your iDevice has powered down because its flat.

Devices cant be compact and fast when they need a bigger battery and have to run a plugin on every web page.

Watts, Amps, Degrees. How does Flash fair?

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:20:00 -0500

I did a test. A test to measure the usage of energy comparing Flash and Quicktime (native OS player).

Test Environment:

Macbook Pro 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo (early 2007)
3 GB RAM
128MB ATI Radeon X1600
Snow Leopard 10.6

Using iStat Menu’s as a source for the live values.

Starting Values:

CPU Amps: 4A
CPU Watts: 3.68W
CPU Temp: 58˚C

Quicktime:

Test: 45 second sample of the Iron Man 2 trailer from the Apple Trailer site. 480p.
Player: Quicktime X on Snow Leopard

CPU Amp: 5.39A, 5.79A, 5.79A, 6.01A = 5.745A average
CPU Watt: 5.89W, 5.7W, 6.0W, 5.8W = 5.8475W average
CPU Temp: 60˚C, 61˚C, 63˚C, 61˚C = 61.25˚C average

Flash:

Test: 45 second sample of the Iron Man 2 trailer from the official Marvel account. 480p.
Player: Flash 10 on Chrome

CPU Amp: 14.7A, 17.6A, 17.6A, 17.57A = 16.8675A average
CPU Watt: 20W, 15.41W, 19.5W, 19.19W = 18.525W average
CPU Temp: 68˚C, 67˚C, 69˚C, 70˚C = 68.5˚C average

The Results:

Before we can compare the results properly lets find out what we have measured.

Amps(Amperes): the ampere is a measure of the amount of electric charge passing a point per unit time. [Wikipedia] How much we are drawing.
Watts: The unit measures the rate of energy conversion. [Wikipedia] Which is basically how much energy we are using.

So the Watt reading is somewhat more important than Amperes. Watts’ is what your electricity company charges you in (watt hours), so lets focus on that.

So Quicktime uses 5.8475W on average and Flash uses 18.525W.

It obvious to see that Flash uses more Watts, more energy, than an OS based player. 3.16x more energy.

So using Flash will eventually, all added up, hurt Johnny Polar Bear and will lead us to some climate based doom. And not to mention cost you more money to use (probably a few cents here and there, but its something).

Note: I hope I have gotten my facts right about Watts and Amperes. Any electricians or electrical engineers that want to correct me, please do.

Vimeo moves to HTML 5 video playback, in Beta

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:12:13 -0500

Vimeo moves to HTML 5 video playback, in Beta:

Vimeo is joining YouTube in the move from Flash to HTML 5 and browser based players.

Flash on mobile devices, privacy disaster waiting to happen

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:41:00 -0500

If you have an iPhone think about this. How much personal data is on that device? All your Contacts, SMS’s, Call Records, Emails, Notes, Photos, Videos, Web History, Passwords?

Now what would happen if someone got access to all that information? Well you would have your identity stolen. All of that information is more than enough for someone to create a duplicate of you and start taking out loans in your name.

Yep it’s a scary thought. If my iPhone was stolen I would run to the nearest computer to perform a remote wipe from MobileMe.

So what happens when you introduce a platform that anyone can develop or publish some code into an executable/SWF file put it on the web (by hacking it onto a popular site) and then have your device then browse that page. Yep, if an exploit exists your device will be owned.

This is the issue that Flash can not overcome. And a reason we can speculate of why Apple is not adding it to their devices.

So what if Flash actually made it onto the iPhone. We’ll you would have 42.48 million devices walking around with all this personal information ready, waiting. Hackers and Identity Theif’s would jump at the chance to be apart of the biggest gold rush of available personal information. So where would you target?

A native application? Nope. Apple checks every one before shipping and to get an App on the store you need to be verified and have a CCard.

By stealing the device? Plausible although MobileMe with its tracking and remote wipe (also available on MS Exchange for business) can stop the theifs in their tracks.

Flash, easy to develop and no moderation required? YES. There is no Apple filter here and anything could waltz in and get what they want, without you even knowing!

So there is a very big case on why Flash should NEVER EVER be on a personal mobile device.

"The number of Lifehacker visitors without Flash installed enabled nearly tripled from 2.32% in 2006,..."

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:42:01 -0500

“The number of Lifehacker visitors without Flash installed enabled nearly tripled from 2.32% in 2006, to 6.07% in 2009”

- Flash’s Decline on Lifehacker, from 2006 to 2010 | Smarterware (via oliyoung)

Ask a question regarding Flash and/or Flash on mobile.

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:18:00 -0500

Ask a question regarding Flash and/or Flash on mobile.:

Created a FormSpring account so anyone, especially the people opposed to my opinions, can throw me a question.

I’d love to see what you have to ask.

Video 3.0, sans-Flash

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:30:53 -0500

The web has grown up in terms of multimedia. It started off with video files just rawly linked in a page, download to view.

Then came the in-browser plug-ins and depending on what you did or didn’t have plugged in you may or may not have been able to see what the website had to offer. I particularly remember stupidvideos.com and having to use the Quicktime plug-in.

Enter Flash. Although it was around for a while it didn’t enter the video space until it was mature enough. Soon every site was serving up our hilarious cat videos with a Flash video player.

Now this is where we stand. Flash is serving up our video content. Being pushed from a variety of different services. Services like the Adobe Flash Streaming Server and others using FLV files stored in CDN’s. It’s probably the best media distribution that has reached the majority of web users to date…

HOWEVER…

Like all things, Flash’s video reign will come to an end. This time is near.

Video 3.0 will change the technology yet again. It will be defined by the HTML 5 tag. Making the Internet able to deliver more multimedia to web inhabitants regardless of installed plug-in’s.

When this tag is included on a website the browser will load up its own player. As an example, Safari would load up a Quicktime player (inline) to watch a video when this is in the page’s markup:

That’s it. No or tags with their equally confusing attributes that if not placed correctly just don’t work.

So the player will change but will anything be better?

YES! And to make this easy here are some points:

Adaptive bitrate changing by using the HTTP video streaming protocol
No lagging, freezing, or crashing the browser (buffering is not one of these)
Better graphics acceleration if the player and OS supports it
Less CPU usage and for any MacBook Pro users, this means a cooler laptop!
Smaller memory footprint
No plug-in installs
No plug-in’s to update
Less security risks
Supports video formats without the need to transcode

Here comes a part of me I lock away in the dark depts of my mind. Not using Flash Players for video playback will save on energy use. Yes its true and I think I can prove it.

I will do a test in a later post recording the Amps and Watts of my CPU and GPU whilst watching a standard movie, one on YouTube and the other in the browser using a browser player.