Comments on: Why does Flash suck on OS X?

By: zan

zan — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:17:19 +0000

All I have to say, is that flash doesn’t work well on PPC machines anymore. It works just fine (not great) on Intel machines. Yay.

By: Hez

Hez — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:51:56 +0000

It's my understanding that Apple may wish to fix this with QuickTime X Player, just like how frustration with Mac Office products has driven to build their own support for exchange on iPhone & now further that with Snow Leopard.

I could be way off base here but many of these flag ship companies like Adobe have been in the pocket of Microsoft for many years now & so they do enough to get by & not appear obvious about their lack of support for Mac or Linux but they are after all profit driven more than anything. The introduction of iPhone & even the new BlackBerry OS has been rapidly changing this.

I predict that within the next 5 years we are going to see a sharp move by web designers towards using a lot less flash & using more HTML 5 & other more modern web standards. Video will likely adopt optimized H.264 as it blows the pants off flash & is unbelievably customizable as a video streaming solution.

As far as game performance goes, it's simply an issue of everything graphics related being designed around DirectX. Most video chipsets support OpenGL as an afterthought, but this is rapidly changing as well. OpenGL has made many advances with the popularity of OS X growing & it's strengths are beginning to shine through. By the way, giving games more access to hardware is why many windows games can crash your whole system when they hang up but on OS X they just crash. Apple is hoping the rectify some of the optimization issues related to OpenGL as an afterthought with the release of Grand Central. Apple will do the optimization & developers will just need to know how to access the APIs. We should see much better optimization going forward.

By: Arnaldo Capo

Arnaldo Capo — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:56:25 +0000

Well, OS X running WoW is so much faster as the beginning, cause of multithread stuff. If it was Directx in windows well, the test isn’t accurate but now I really doubt that in windows runs faster than in OS X. In WoW OS X there an extra feature that the windows pc does not have. Video Recording

By: Chris Adams

Chris Adams — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:47:33 +0000

It’s important to remember that Flash is essentially early 90s technology – they’ve made many improvements, of course, but the assumptions about what is and isn’t fast have not held up as well on OS X, particularly since Vista hasn’t caught much whereas every single Mac Flash runs on has the full Quartz UI. Flash does seem to have become more reliable but for years it was reviled by Mac developers as the biggest source of crashes in WebKit applications (e.g. http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=3432)

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark/ has a number of interesting comments from people at Apple, Adobe, etc. The one which I find most telling is that since this was published in May WebKit is now actually about 40% faster than Flash 10 on my system (for reference, Safari 3.1 =~ Flash / 3) — I think that performance delta is going to expand as WebKit, Chrome and Mozilla all start to benefit from the fact that their development is both faster and a lot more quality oriented than Adobe’s. (Having just completed a Flash project, I was surprised at the number of newbie bugs in CS3 – it really reminded me of Windows software development circa 1996)

By: Elliott

Elliott — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:58:40 +0000

My understanding from a discussion with someone on the Flash engineering team when Flash Player 9 was coming out, is that it has to do with the vastly different graphics layers on the differently platforms. Basically I was told that it takes a lot of work to tweak the player to use the OS's APIs so things render quickly and have access to the hardware. To do this for one platform is one thing, but to do it equally for both results in player bloat and obvious time and energy costs.

Apparently they're working on a unified solution that will be similar to a write once deploy everywhere solution meaning more comparable performance on both platforms, but just weren't there yet.

So it's not that OSX isn't capable, it's that the player code isn't taking proper advantage of its custom APIs because most tweaking is done for the OS with the larger market, ie Windows.

By: tom b

tom b — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:47:38 +0000

I think Flash ALSO sucks in Windows, at least in XP.

As for Adobe Reader: on the Mac, it's not a huge issue because Preview is enormously better in speed, launch time, and usability, anyway. Is there a PDF reader anyone really likes in XP Does anyone know of a good PDF reader in XP/Vista?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:10:43 +0000

Who cares!? It runs good enough to use, so shut up and use it.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:15:59 +0000

Regarding WoW, the article you reference is old (4/2006). In 12/2006, Blizzard released an update that enables multi-threaded OpenGL on Intel Macs (running Tiger or higher). Do a google search and see the details for yourself. The performance advantage was removed. DirectX is not inherently faster than OpenGL. People need to understand there is a difference between OpenGL and Apple's implementation of OpenGL. As others have mentioned, driver performance can also be a factor.

Regarding Flash, I think it's best to just acknowledge that nobody outside of Macromedia/Adobe knows. There is nothing to suggest the difference is due to technical issues between the two operating systems. Common sense would indicate that Adobe (and Macromedia before them) have not bothered to optimize Flash for either Mac OS X or Linux.

By: dan

dan — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:09:46 +0000

for the same reason it sucks everywhere. who needs it?

By: Viswakarma

Viswakarma — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:48:01 +0000

"other more open technologies than flash".

Brad,

could please give more details of these technologies?

Thanks!