Thoughts about flash

Given the recent events surround flash, I just felt like expressing a few ideas on flash (or mostly flex, since that’s what I know well). I’m not Steve Jobs, so don’t expect anything ground breaking here.

For those who have been living in a cave the last 2 months, let’s sum it up:

• Apple products don’t support flash. Some (including me) hoped that the flash player would show up on the iPad.
• Instead of that, Jobs issued an open letter on flash, explaining why it’s a piece of shit on apple platforms
• Recently, Microsoft issued the same kind of statements. Wrapped in corporate speech, but still. We should get them a reality distorsion field like Jobs’ for christmas, they could use it
• Google acquired On2 and it is suspected they might start competing with Adobe on the web video player (flash main reason of success for the last 10 years)
• The whole content industry seems to be tired of having to support flash, realized it could skip Adobe with the iphone and seems willing to do that for desktops too now that HTML5 is out there and that MS announced full support with IE9.

Adobe could have worked out those issues had they reacted correctly and some time ago.
How?
Well, for a starter, fixing the performance issues of the Flash player would have been a good start. And I’m not talking about the access to hardware acceleration for video playback. I’m talking about general performance.

For example, I’ve been playing with flex effects recently, I was trying to get a slide transition for the view stack, something simple, like the iPhone does when you’re swiping through your application pages.
Well, the iphone does this smoothly, on an small arm processor and very little RAM. Same thing for the iPad on 1024*768 resolution. Windows Flash player renders this just correctly on a core2duo 2.5GHz, for a movie around 800*600, with around 60% of the cpu used. It’s choppy on the mac flash player, same kind of horsepower… After testing, flash player on the latest imac 3GHz core2duo runs slower than the windows version on a  … P4 2GHz… T’oh! Oh, and it took me 4 days of experimenting pretty much everything and optimizing the thing to get it running half decently….

Or something else, really stupid: make the flash player multi threaded, god damnit. I’m sick of my UI freezing up because an event processing is heavy on CPU. Or just because my ResultHandler is processing 40KB of AMF3. I don’t care if there’s no multithread API, I just want the flash player not to freeze on something stupid… I’m tired of seeing my CPU monitor going crazy all day long.

Some might argue that the flash player is a plugin, so it can’t run decently. The AIR player has the same issues, and it’s a regular application, so I guess the problem is deeper than that.
And when you see how Adobe has been struggling to release flash products recently (flex4 had over a year delay, we’ve been hearing about player 10.1 for more than a year now, Catalyst is still beta), I’m not sure they will be able to pull that kind of magic.

Open sourcing the flash player could have helped. It did great for the JVM, and even if they wouldn’t have had any contributions (the product is so complex I doubt they would ever have had anything actually), it would at the very least calmed down the open source community who is eager to see flash die. We could have had better browser integration, and hopefully see fixes for the security issues.
But unfortunately, it’s a process that will take them years to accomplish (it took sun something like 18 months to open source the jdk + JVM), so even if they do it know, flash might very well be dead (or confined to advertisement) by the time it is open sourced.

But no, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’ve lost faith in Adobe. They’re moving slowly. Way too slowly for a company getting hammered by Apple on the mobile space, Google with it’s blazing fast V8 and soon Microsoft with IE9.

Jobs utterly hates Flash and Apple has proven that a web without flash is possible.
Microsoft is saying in substance “We asked Ballmer to write an open letter with his thoughts on flash, it ended up in a pile of broken chairs in his office. We don’t really like it, but since our clients (or at least some of them) still want it, we can’t say openly what’s our thoughts on it. Sorry about that adobe, we’ll give you a hand until IE9 is out and takes over IE8/7, after that, uh… Farewell, so long, and thanks for all the fish!”

It was fun while it lasted. It’s a shame a good framework like Flex is dying due to poor VM performance and lack of openness from its creator. I’ve had fun writing flex code, but I guess those days are over. Tired of struggling to get halfway decent performances.

Back to J2EE and Cocoa now.