Precisely. QuickTime on Macs can use hardware-based video decompression. If Apple allowed browser plugins to move video-decompression out of the CPU too, then that would be great.
I think that you are using this as a convenient cop out. For two reasons.
First, hardware (i.e. GPU) acceleration makes a significant difference only when decoding h.264. For h.263 and On2 V6 you shouldn't need hardware acceleration. GPU accelerated h.264 came in Quicktime X in Snow Leopard and is not available on all Snow Leopard compatible machines. The disparity in performance between Quicktime, and other player-codec packages for that matter, and Flash has been around for years.
The second, and more important in my opinion, reason is that Flash doesn't have performance and stability issues only when it comes to video. They are more apparent with video, but all kinds of content - games, sites, even sometimes ads - make the Flash plugin disproportionately task the system.
Your first point doesn't make sense, considering jd said "if Apple allowed browser plugins to move video-decompression out of the CPU too, then that would be great." Flash can't use hardware acceleration until Apple adds support for it to their video drivers. Sure, it took adobe a long time to get to this point, but video online is still young compared to the lifetime of the Flash Plugin, so your argument that the plugin has been around "for years" also doesn't make much sense.
I also don't agree with your second point, considering the things you are complaining about "games, sites, ads" are generally created with Flash because the advertiser (or ad agency) wants to do something that HTML can't do. It's their choice to do it, so don't blame their poor choices (and often poor coding) on the technology.
Consider that in general games and rich interactive things take more CPU than static HTML and graphics, so of course it will take more CPU to render those things. If you don't like it, don't play Flash games and boycott sites that use excessive poorly coded Flash.
> Consider that in general games and rich interactive things take more CPU than static HTML and graphics, so of course it will take more CPU to render those things. If you don't like it, don't play Flash games and boycott sites that use excessive poorly coded Flash.
There are Javascript/CSS demos out there that are much more dynamic/interactive than the average Flash based ad that still use less CPU.
In a similar vein, there are other Safari plugins out there that do much more than the average Flash based ad that use less CPU.
The Flash plugin uses more resources than people expect it to based on their experience with Flash in Windows, as well as their experience with other technologies on Safari/OS X. I don't think it is a collective hallucination.
> There are Javascript/CSS demos out there that are much more dynamic/interactive than the average Flash based ad that still use less CPU.
I don't agree with this in general, but let's say that I did: Of course native things will run faster than a sandboxed plugin. Unfortunately Flash still does WAY more than browsers do.
> In a similar vein, there are other Safari plugins out there that do much more than the average Flash based ad that use less CPU.
Oh, like what? Some specialized thing that does one thing only? Comparing other plugins to eachother won't work unless you are comparing the same code vs. each other. Actually, it would be nice to compare flash vs. silverlight in a pure performance test using "real life" situations like video and motion graphics.
> The Flash plugin uses more resources than people expect it to based on their experience with Flash in Windows, as well as their experience with other technologies on Safari/OS X. I don't think it is a collective hallucination.
So now we are back to Mac vs. Windows, and it's been covered enough in this thread that OS X is more limiting than windows when it comes to browser plugins, and it sounds to me like it's up to Apple to fix it, or for some other browser maker to come along and do it better, so we'll have to wait and see.
"As the numbers will show, Flash performs far better in Vista versus Mac OS X running on the same hardware, and it actually improved slightly with the version 10 update."
(OS X + Safari + Flash 9 Plugin = CPU hog)
(OS X + Safari + Flash 10 Plugin = slightly less of a CPU hog)
(Windows + Firefox + Flash 10 Plugin = CPU friendly)
I think that part we can agree on. It's unfortunate Ars didn't report on (Windows + Safari + Flash 10) or (OS X + Firefox + Flash 10) since those would have been a nice data points. I'll also admit this article is a bit dated but the point is that here is an example where Adobe tweaked some code and claimed a 3x increase in speed. Users were complaining all that time and some people were blaming the Plugin API. A performance problem can have multiple contributors.
My point is that you would think Adobe would push on it with all of their talent since it's in their best interest to optimize. I think though, that it's only computer geeks who realize it's caused by a plugin (for whatever reason) and the general public just thinks "my computer is slow".
I still have never seen a good analysis/description of what is flawed in the Safari plugin API.
In the end, I just don't think there's enough published data to settle this.
They can, but then they have to hand the result back to the browser to render, which can be slow.
Check out the new stuff coming in flash player 10.1, which will have some hardware acceleration, BUT not on OS X because it requires updated video drivers. Since Apple controls the video drivers on OS X, we just have to wait for them to update them (and since they don't seem to like Flash much, it could be a while).
Well, VLC et al seem to be able to decode and play videos without a problem, and one would think that the remaining 85% of CPU would be enough to copy the decoded image data into a buffer for the browser... But I haven't tried to do it myself, maybe it's harder than it seems.
I often see this claim made on the Net, and it is always quickly followed by someone saying that it's a load of rubbish, and that there is nothing stopping Adobe from doing harware acceleration in Safari plugins for the Mac.
So, this being Hacker News, is there someone out there with some experience writing Safari plugins that can give us a definitive answer to this question (preferably with a brief description of the APIs involved).
I don't think I can stand reading yet another thread on this topic which is filled with what appear to be poorly-researched assertions...
Sorry, I haven't heard of any progress on this yet... here's the best current guidance I've seen:
<em>"In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."</em>
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1...
