> I understand that this is the future and hate Flash as
> much as the next guy, but I just don't understand why
> we're just suddenly bashing Adobe.
I've been wondering about the recent change myself. Considering that it's not election season, it seems prudent to wonder about the sudden flood of unverifiable identities in discussion forums. Hard to tell, but necessary to wonder.
> "The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins.
Indeterminate. The logs show that Flash made a call. It didn't show where that call went when it failed. (I usually run Safari and Firefox in parallel on my Mac because both have stability problems, despite using a Flash blocker.) Most of the Player code is the same across OS, only the outer wrappers and connecting APIs differ.
On the happy side, there has recently been some increased cooperation with the Safari team, and when combined with the mobile optimizations you can expect to see some of the gains described by Kevin Lynch:
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_...
Then you'd have to do version-checks, if you're actually delivering content to audiences. Fewer people have it, fewer people use the current version. Most codecs on content sites are H.264 or On2 VP6 (successor to Theora). Easier to solicit Apple to open up their acceleration APIs to plugins.
<em>"The simple fact remains that Flash is so resource-hungry that it is undeniably badly written."</em>
<em>"It is entirely unreasonable to assume that there is any statistically significant proportion of those plugin crashes that aren't Flash"</em>
I've got a slow connection on my Mac at home, and have consistently used Flash-blockers and ad-blockers over the years to control what's pushed to me. Even so, Firefox and Safari regularly stall and require a restart. May be my Mac, though.
What I've heard (and I don't have access to Apple's source records) is that most of these failures are when the plugin requests more memory, and the browser responds ungracefully. Flash just triggered it but didn't cause it.
But until Apple gets out there with clear and honest executive communication, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.
(On the good side, Safari team has been permitted to communicate with the Player team, and some of these problems may be addressed. We're still seeking Apple Corps approval to decompress video off the CPU on their computers. It's their business decision to make.)
Sure. Most of the crashing doesn't occur in other forums, where people post with their real identities. It's only when Apple business models are threatened that we see all these "ray@gmail" and "[email protected]" come out.
If people were straight up, and focused on trying to solve a problem, that'd be one thing. Sudden swells of anonymous turfing is another. Apple won't even go on-the-record with their executive-level smears, for goshsakes... what kind of corporate culture is that?
Good point: Could you use the Sublime HTML/JS set for other codecs? Probably could -- the codec would make less of a difference to transport control functionality than the browser's varying support for JavaScript and VIDEO APIs would be.
Travis keeps the sites confidential, for obvious reasons. It's plausible that there was another shift in sites sampled recently, similar to the doubling that it reported for Silverlight starting one week in November:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdowdell/4180222368/
I saw Alp's post last night... plausible, a good engineering challenge. Not sure how it will play out in the world though. But it sure added some spice to this morning's Theora-vs-H.264 wars.... ;-)
Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and subsequently used to make Firefox faster.
(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series, H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for redistribution by others.)