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Apple throws Adobe a bone -- on the Mac

by Chris Rawson Apr 22nd 2010 at 7:00PM

Adobe's Flash Player has never performed as well in Mac OS X as it does on Windows-running PCs. The traditionally poor performance of Adobe's plugin on the Mac has led many iPhone and iPad users to support Apple's decision to keep Flash off of its mobile devices. While the upcoming Flash 10.1 does boast some significant performance improvements over its predecessors, the performance is still pretty terrible compared to h.264, which has access to hardware-accelerated video decoding via the GPUs in Macs.

Adobe's stance has long been to blame Apple for the poor performance of Flash on the Mac, citing Apple's unwillingness to allow third-party developers access to APIs necessary for hardware-accelerated video. Adobe no longer has that excuse to fall back upon: Apple posted a technical note back in late March that removes this restriction and allows third-party developers access to hardware-acceleration APIs for h.264 decoding in compatible GPUs. The technical note describes "a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs" -- meaning only the latest Mac GPUs, the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M and GeForce GT 330M. "It is intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames," the note continues.

So there you have it, Adobe. The one thing that's supposedly been holding you back from getting decent Flash performance on the Mac is now gone. Now that Apple has removed this "stumbling block" and you're unfettered by Apple's restrictions, the onus is on you to prove that you can deliver a well-crafted Flash plugin for the Mac -- preferably one that doesn't crash constantly or send my fans into a cyclone any time I try to watch full-screen Flash videos.

It will be interesting to see how Adobe responds to this. If Adobe takes advantage of the hardware-acceleration APIs, how much improvement Flash's performance sees as a result will settle the debate once and for all over who's been at fault for Flash's subpar performance on the Mac. Even if Flash sees substantial performance on the Mac as a result of this move, though, there's probably no chance that Apple will relent on its stance regarding Flash on iPhone OS.

[Via MacRumors]

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Adobe's Flash Player has never performed as well in Mac OS X as it does on Windows-running PCs. The traditionally poor performance of...
 

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chris

Maybe adobe can take out their erroneous debugger calls this time as well?

April 29 2010 at 8:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
macserv

It's far more likely that the next thing Adobe makes for the Mac will be another excuse.

April 26 2010 at 12:00 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
handy

Finally, hardware accelerated flash on mac.

April 24 2010 at 2:23 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Beenyweenies

It will be interesting to see how this plays out once the iPad is jailbroken and someone ports flash player, if that's even possible.

April 24 2010 at 2:02 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
usingpond

It's so in vogue to complain about Flash. The term "plugin" implies that you have to go out and download it — how many people have actually had to do this? It's really just as much part of the browser environment as Javascript, which, like Flash, can crash if poorly written.

If you're converting video or playing a game, maybe you shouldn't be watching Keyboard Cat anyway.

April 23 2010 at 9:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to usingpond's comment
ziggybopper

"The term "plugin" implies that you have to go out and download it — how many people have actually had to do this?"

Aah, everyone.

On a Mac. check out Volume/Library/Internet Plug-Ins, you'll find "Flash Player.plugin"

At some point you downloaded this "plugin" or you wouldn't be viewing Flash videos/sites. And up some point, you're asked to update this "plugin" when Adobe releases updates.

April 23 2010 at 12:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
usingpond

@ziggybopper

lol how old is your Mac? Apple has bundled it with its computers for a while now IIRC.

April 23 2010 at 1:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tom

My Mac gets a whole lot hotter when I watch a HD video on YouTube.

Big deal.

I've visited many websites laden with Flash ads, on my Core 2 Duo MacBook, not your fancy Mac Pro with its 8-core CPUs, and I have never experienced a crash. Sometimes it slows down, but only for a few seconds or so, definitely not the end of the world.

Let's see you try to develop a plugin like Flash. Oh that's right, we're all consumers. Shut up.

April 23 2010 at 4:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dan Woods

You know they won't make flash run any better in Mac OS, even completely unfettered.

The only way they are going to Obliterate (even in the slang usage of the term) Apple is by causing Snow Leopard to once again become unstable.

High-level API's add a layer of stability to an OS. If user code is given the ability to write direct to hardware, it also has the ability to cause crashes which can't be caught by the OS.

April 23 2010 at 3:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Erik

What kind of Flash sites are you people visiting? Are you running super old hardware with very little RAM?

I'm a Cocoa AND Flash/Flex developer and in all my years on a Mac I've rarely run into a swf that makes my browser crash, studder or chug. Yeah, some swfs make my fans run but not necessarily Flash with video.

I don't understand the hate towards Adobe and Flash. Apple's success/greatness (or the web in general) does not depend on the failure of Flash or Adobe.

April 23 2010 at 12:52 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Erik's comment
wygit

>>I don't understand the hate towards Adobe and Flash.

It's because Steve said so. Didn't you get the memo?

All Mac crashes are caused by Flash. Every problem the Mac has is caused by Flash.

We need to switch NOW to a spec that's ... um... supposed to hit it's Candidate Recommendation stage in two years...

WHATWG: "It is estimated by the editor that HTML5 will reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012". http://bit.ly/aNdjlg

and another view of HTML5 http://bit.ly/cPQecn

April 23 2010 at 11:58 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Scott Rose

Nothing will change about Flash's performance on the Mac until Adobe assigns more than A HALF OF AN EMPLOYEE (and a non-Mac expert, at that) to work on Flash for Mac. More details here:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/14/chronicles-of-conflict-the-history-of-adobe-vs-apple/

April 22 2010 at 11:48 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
wvmikep

Now, about that memory leak in Flash....

April 22 2010 at 10:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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