Adobe CTO defends Flash against battery life criticism

"Here is an accurate translation of Adobe's stance: 'End users should get to choose which video content technology is best, letting vendors compete with one another on purely technical merit.'"

That's a great idealistic statement, but you sound like you've drunk Adobe's Kool-aid. They've run up against a growing group of mobile devices that for good reasons (performance, battery life) are challenging their monopoly on web animations and video, and they don't like it.

Adobe is waging war with Apple and enlisting end users to fight their fight. I won't be an unwitting pawn, an unpaid minion fighting for Adobe's profits at the expense of progress in the mobile realm.

I appreciate your acknowledgement that, in the best world, technologies should be chosen based on merit.

On that, you and I seem to be in agreement.

As for who waged war on whom, that is probably too subjective to decide, and isn't really the point of interest for me.

As an engineer, I prefer to see situations in which technologies can openly compete.

I think you have inverted the notion of monopoly. Monopoly is all about who has the power. Flash is not a platform. It is an add-on. Apple can be monopolistic in preventing software from running on Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Microsoft can be monopolistic by preventing software from running on Windows, or by refusing to license Windows for certain devices.

How exactly has Adobe behaved in a monopolistic fashion regarding Flash? Keep in mind that winning a dominant market position is very different from being a monopoly. Flash gained mass adoption due to the lack of competitive solutions for video and animation. However, Adobe has no control over the installation of the Flash plugin. Apple and Microsoft has some control over what software ships bundled with their operating systems, but neither has control over what software the user is allowed to install on top of their operating systems.

iOS represents a significant departure in operating system philosophy, in that third-party applications and add-ons are restricted.

From your comments, it seems like you, too, would prefer to see an open competition between technologies, letting the best one win on merit.

What do you think would be the best way to foster open competition (and hence the best end user experience for all of us)? By definition, the current situation doesn't allow for open competition. Whether or not Flash is allowed on Apple devices is currently the choice of one individual, rather than the collective vote of developers and end users (who, I might add are the ones who paid for the Apple devices).

If you don't like Flash, for whatever reason, you don't have to do anything. Don't install it. If it comes bundled, uninstall it. On iOS, I don't have the complementary option. The decision has already been made for me.

By the way, I don't consider myself anti-Apple at all. I have been a Macintosh user and developer since the early 90s. I have an iPhone and an iPad, and my family has lots of Apple devices. I love Apple. I just happen to love Adobe, too.

The correct answer is: there shouldn't be a "gatekeeper" for the Internet. Not Apple, not Adobe, not the "content creators." I don't know how these creators "voted with their wallets"--after all, Adobe has a functional monopoly in this area, so these creators likely didn't have much choice about using Flash--but the people who really get to vote online are the consumers. If these creators want our eyeballs on their precious creations, they either better have indispensable content--indispensable enough to make people switch to devices with which it works well--or they'd best make sure their content plays well with the devices we want to use. I have an iphone and I block flash on my mac--I'm surprised by how little I miss Flash most of the time.

Content creators want me to stop blocking Flash? They should do everything in their power to make sure their content doesn't screw up my computing experience. Often, Apple's misguided when they go on one of their crusades, like the ones against HDMI and bluray. But in this case, they're standing up for their customers, and fortunately, they have enough power in the tablet/smartphone market that Adobe can't just ignore them any more.

Well, "gatekeeper" in the sense that you can't get content that no one created, so at some level the content creators get to decide what you see (others can limit you beyond that (as Apple does on iOS), but they can't give you access to what isn't there).

And the content creators certainly voted with their wallets - they could have coded web pages without Flash. They decided that using Flash made financial sense to them (given that in many cases, the alternatives would have been to create web pages that were less dynamic and/or lacked functionality they wanted and so were less valuable, or to create a custom plug-in to duplicate the functionality they wanted from Flash, at undoubtedly greater cost to them and with all the downsides of supporting and encouraging use of (another) custom plug-in). If there were other alternatives that provided equivalent functionality at similar or better prices, they might have won out (and in the early (and less functional) days of Flash, there were other plug-in based content generators/displayers, but most fell by the wayside over the years). Over time, HTML5/JS/whatever may reach that point, but I don't believe they yet provide equivalent functionality, certainly don't have the same level of tool support, and there is clearly huge inertia for Flash (both the huge amount of existing code that can be leveraged and the training/experience/comfort-level of the developers) that will slow the transition away from Flash. For simple things like just displaying video, the cut-over can be quicker, but for complex things (like complex dynamic pages, Flash games, etc.) it's not as simple as flipping a switch.

The consumers get a good level of vote, but as you say, if there is content that is indispensable, then the provider has you over a bit of a barrel. My bank's website (for example) has features that only work with Flash. I find this very irritating (and have complained to them about it), but it isn't a deal-breaker for me - for a whole list of reasons, I am not going to switch banks just because I can't fully use their website from my phone (and wouldn't even if I couldn't completely use it from a desktop). I don't see any reason _why_ those features need to use Flash, but in their defense, at the time they first implemented this, effectively _all_ computers that their users would use to access their site supported Flash.

With regard to Apple's (well, Jobs') crusade against Flash - it is certainly true that Flash is a resource hog and is a major source of security problems. However, it isn't clear to me that these are the _true_ underlying causes of the crusade, or if they are just post facto excuses. Apple doesn't want code running on iOS devices that they don't control (or at least vet to meet their security and usage standards), so until recently they didn't allow interpreted code at all (not just Flash, but no Java or .Net/CLR, either), and they still don't allow any downloaded code (so you can have an app written in one of these, but the entire code must be part of the app, nothing downloaded at runtime). Some of the rationale may be for their customers' benefit, but at least some of it is to maintain control of what happens on their platform...

It's not better.. It's what *IS*.

BETTER would be if I could watch FailBlog videos on my iPad..

So your response is to not play those games, right?

Or is it to tell everyone else in the world what they are 'supposed' to be using?

(Half the comments in this thread are saying "Kill Flash" without offering ANYTHING that can take its place.

... take its place NOW.

Or am I missing something?

They are, aren't they? I see there are pros and cons with Flash. It has served well, since it was acquired by Adobe (and before), but with the advent, I'm suggesting perhaps there is something better with HTML5.

Either way, there is a business (or even opensource) opportunity for wholesale conversion of the "decade of content" in Flash format to HTML5, which takes less power to use. I haven't seen the statistics to say it does, but I know what my experience with Flash is.

I just made this little comparsion:

http://www.fabian-bucher.ch/comparsion/

it's just a small blue square wandering around the page, so don't expect much.

on my system the html method is the fastest with about 2-3% cpu, followed by flash width about 5-6%. slowest method in this case is gif which sucks about 20% (no surprise there).

just for clarification:
I made this in about 10 minutes so don't expect much ;-)
the html-code only works in safari (afaik... chrome didn't repeat the animation and i don't care about that. the animation uses webkit-code so don't expect it to run in firefox etc)