Adobe to release 64 bit flash support soon after 10.1

[Nick Brunt]

One of the main problems with Adobe Flash Player is it's lack of support for 64 bit browsers. This was never really a problem in the past but since the release of IE 8 x64 on 64 bit systems, people want to make use of the capabilites that 64 bit brings.

Adobe say that they are working on support for 64 bit browsers and that it will be implemented in a release soon after 10.1 (which has just come out as a developer release).

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/6b3af6c9.html

[Rudy]

about time, how long has it been since Linux got their 64bit version?

[torrentthief]

still no eta tho, they could release it in 2yrs time.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

It just says an "upcoming" release, 10.1 was the upcoming release for over a year.

[Ci7]

you got it wrong.

the first verison of IE which was x64 is IE6 not 8

and wtf with the change in there tongue

they said they are going to release Flash 10.1 x64 shortly after intial release

[kiddingguy]

about time indeed

[Nick Brunt]

Yes it's not exactly a rock solid announcement but at least we know they're working on it.

[MistaT40]

This could take a while:(

[Nick Brunt]

the first verison of IE which was x64 is IE6 not 8

I never said IE8 was the first x64 browser... but tbh no one used IE6 x64 really because back then very few people had 64 bit machines and those who did probably weren't running IE anyway... it wasn't exactly the best browser around...

[rawr_boy81]

It is depressing, however, that Flash still is horrible when it comes to quality; speed, reliability, responsiveness, lightweightedness etc.

The only way one can expect things to improve would be if a major Flash user suddenly moved to Silverlight. If Microsoft provided their development tools for Mac and Windows, opened up their specifications and financially got behind third party implementations, it would provide momentum to over take flash.

[zhangm Supervisor]

Adobe is working on Flash Player support for 64-bit platforms as part of our ongoing commitment to the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player. We expect to provide native support for 64-bit platforms in an upcoming release of Flash Player following the release of Flash Player 10.1.

[Udedenkz]

It is depressing, however, that Flash still is horrible when it comes to quality; speed, reliability, responsiveness, lightweightedness etc.

The only way one can expect things to improve would be if a major Flash user suddenly moved to Silverlight. If Microsoft provided their development tools for Mac and Windows, opened up their specifications and financially got behind third party implementations, it would provide momentum to over take flash.

The main this that is unoptimized about flash is the CPU video decoding and rendering. To evaluate, youtube videos slightly lagg on an Atom 270, and youtube HD videos manage no more than 6FPS on an Atom. On the other hand, if you actually download the MP4 videos and run then in Home Cinma, youtube 720p plays smoothly.

No. That makes as much sense as having another provider for electricity using a different set of power lines.

[hdood]

It is depressing, however, that Flash still is horrible when it comes to quality; speed, reliability, responsiveness, lightweightedness etc.

The only way one can expect things to improve would be if a major Flash user suddenly moved to Silverlight. If Microsoft provided their development tools for Mac and Windows, opened up their specifications and financially got behind third party implementations, it would provide momentum to over take flash.

Silverlight is also sluggish (in fact freezes my browser at times), resource heavy, not available in 64-bit, and so on. Same **** really.

[bob21]

It is depressing, however, that Flash still is horrible when it comes to quality; speed, reliability, responsiveness, lightweightedness etc.

The only way one can expect things to improve would be if a major Flash user suddenly moved to Silverlight. If Microsoft provided their development tools for Mac and Windows, opened up their specifications

With the release of Google Chrome I see blogs and articles blaming the Flash Player for poor performance and somehow linking this to the fact that it is not open source. Time to clarify a few bits. I'll start with classic comments:

"Flash hogs my CPU!"

1. HTML != Flash

HTML is a static document format. Flash content is in its core a classic multimedia format and most Flash content is still purely passive media.

What does that mean? When rendering HTML pages CPU usage only peaks for a very short of amount of time, essentially one single frame in Flash terms. After that almost no resources apart from memory are required. If you do not interact with the HTML page at all, no CPU time is required.

How does Flash compare? Most animated Flash content like rich media advertisement continues to use CPU resources to drive animation, video and/or sound. As opposed to static HTML which has exactly 1 frame, Flash content can have an infinite amount of frames which are played back over time.

Flash is great to provide experiences you could not get otherwise. Animation, video and sound are functions the browser does not (yet) provide, or at least they are not used to the same extend yet by designers. Once the browser will be used to play the same type of multimedia content you will face the same resource usage issues. It takes CPU cycles to decode video, sound and render animation. This is just a fact of life, we are however improving how much is used release after release, something benchmarks can back up.

So, there is a fundamental difference in media type. HTML is static, Flash is not. To put it in terms you might be able to understand:

If you take a picture and print it out you use energy only once and then can continue to view the picture forever without consuming any further energy. If you record a movie you will need some form of machine to play it back which will continue consume energy in form of a projector. The Flash Player is a projector.

"You are so full of it, AJAX does not hog my CPU!"

2. AJAX != Flash, but when done correctly AJAX can be the same as Flash

In most practical instances AJAX is used to drive RIAs. Examples include Gmail, Google Maps and many others. One fundamental property of good applications is that they only respond to either network activity or user input. Peak CPU usage is limited to these events. In general, if you do not touch the browser page no CPU time is required.

Compare this again to Flash animations, video and sound which in many cases remain passive experiences with no requirement for external events to drive the content. This will obviously use CPU resources continuously.

Now, it is perfectly possible to implement a Flash RIA application (that usually means using Flex) which uses the same or even less peak CPU than a AJAX RIA and only responds to network and user input. Flash is a flexible multiple paradigm platform, it depends on what the designer/programmer wanted to do. Unfortunately we at Adobe tend to see of a lot of RIAs which do not follow that principle and add lots of moving sugar to their applications which do little to improve actual usability.

Following good coding practices Flash can yield equivalent or better results than AJAX for many types of RIAs. Another benefit is that writing RIAs in Flash is truly cross browser as there is one Flash Player implementation only.

"Bull, SVG and Canvas show that it can be done better"

3. SVG/Canvas != Flash

Have you ever seen SVG or the canvas tag being used to implement anything else than static (1-frame) content? Have you ever seen rich media advertisement done using SVG or the Canvas tag? I mean not some demo page but actual deployed content. If so you will realize that the same resource usage issues apply.

"You are clueless, why does Flash suck up CPU time when it is on a hidden tab?"

4. Easy shortcuts do not work

Believe it or not but we and the browser vendors have tried to disable/pause/stop Flash content when a tab is hidden. The results were disastrous user experience wise to say the least. Disabling Flash to get any benefit CPU resource wise means the following:

Sound will have to stop

Any network transfer will have to stop

ActionScript execution will have to stop

Each one of these affect CPU resource usage and would affect user experience if we would turn it off. However the Flash Player does not render anything if it is on a hidden tab, we only execute the operations mentioned in the above list.

There is one exception to the rendering optimization: WMODE. If you use WMODE the Flash Player has no way of knowing if it is hidden or not and will continue to do a full render. Do not use WMODE. Unfortunately lots of rich media advertisement I see out there continues to enable this for no apparent reason.

"Flash sucks!"

5. You can help to educate web designers so common mistakes are not made

Huge help would be to adopt strict policies especially for rich media advertisement. I like the rules Google has put forward for Flash ads. Quoting:

"Animation Length: Animated ads are restricted to a maximum of 15 seconds (at a 15-20 fps frame rate), after which point they must remain static. These ads must also comply with the other animation policies."

Personally I would go even further and request the following:

After the animation has played no CPU resources should be used, ActionScript should be on a stop() command.

Mouse tracking or other event handling is not allowed unless you activate the banner with a mouse click.

DO NOT USE WMODE UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TRANSPARENCY! I can't stress that enough. Given the architecture of plugins there is no way for the Flash Player to know if Flash content is on a hidden tab or not and disable rendering properly. If you use WMODE the Flash Player will continue to suck up CPU cycles as if the tab was visible. In addition WMODE is much slower than the normal mode.

These simple rules would address almost all the complaints we hear about. Adobe has unfortunately only limited influence on what content gets deployed, in this case it is really up to the community to balk at the web sites putting up content which impacts user experience negatively.

--------------------

Like with any powerful technology it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot and with the ease of use of Flash that is unfortunately too common.

Despite of that we are working with all browser vendors to improve performance and user experience whenever possible. There are differences between browsers and our goal is to close this gap once and for all. We are for example looking forward to work together with Google to improve Flash performance in Google Chrome.

On our (Adobe) side we are also looking forward to improve Flash performance further. Flash Player 10 for instance is making the first steps towards hardware accelerated rendering which will provide a huge boost in rendering performance. On the scripting side Tamarin-tracing will improve scripting performance dramatically. This is work we share with the Mozilla foundation which will use the same core libraries under the TaceMonkey project. The latest benchmarks are quite remarkable.

http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/09/on-performance.html

[_dandy_]

One of the main problems with Adobe Flash Player is it's lack of support for 64 bit browsers.

Given its track record, I'm perfectly happy to do without introducing another attack vector on the x64 platform.

[bob21]

Given its track record, I'm perfectly happy to do without introducing another attack vector on the x64 platform.

Better disable javascript in all your browsers everywhere then as all flash does is pass on js to the browser via geturl, Theyres a double standard in play here ;)

[Growled Member]

That's good news. At least we know it's coming, some time or another.

[rawr_boy81]

all quoted stuff that couldn't be quoted thanks to the lack of embedded quoting - why does neowin disable spell checking on chrome?

Why did you bold "opened up their specifications"? You bold it but didn't even address a single thing to do with the text you change to bold. Fill me in dude on why every Flash website sucks royally - you can't honestly expect me to believe that there isn't a single Flash developer out there who can use the tool properly - and Flash is immune to crappiness.

Why is it when I have my web browser open on youtube, no video is playing etc, that my CPU utilisation goes way up to 70-100% explain why my fans have to speed up to full capacity on my laptop when I am trying to record a video but the same thing doesn't happen if I have my web browser open and flash is disabled.

You're apologising for a crap technology and I can't work out why you're doing so.

Edited November 20, 2009 by rawr_boy81

[Elliott]

Snipped (a bunch of crap from Adobe about how they're not accountable for anything, apparently)

I think the point here is that only Adobe can improve the performance of Flash, whereas any browser vendor can improve the performance of its Canvas tag, JavaScript, or CSS3 animation implementation.

[bob21]

Why did you bold "opened up their specifications"? You bold it but didn't even address a single thing to do with the text you change to bold. Fill me in dude on why every Flash website sucks royally - you can't honestly expect me to believe that there isn't a single Flash developer out there who can use the tool properly - and Flash is immune to crappiness.

Because it shows that there is a double standard in play , Everyone blows flash CPU usage way out of proportion yet when HTML Finally ( I honestly thought DNF would come first) provides the same functionality (in flash MX2004 with theora)

Why is it when I have my web browser open on youtube, no video is playing etc, that my CPU utilisation goes way up to 70-100%

Either your laptop royally sucks (My HTC Shift eats Youtube HD) or your just deliberately blowing this up. Regardless.

1. HTML != Flash

HTML is a static document format. Flash ™ content is in its core a classic multimedia format and most Flash content is still purely passive media.

What does that mean? When rendering HTML pages CPU usage only peaks for a very short of amount of time, essentially one single frame in Flash terms. After that almost no resources apart from memory are required. If you do not interact with the HTML page at all, no CPU time is required.

How does Flash compare? Most animated Flash content like rich media advertisement continues to use CPU resources to drive animation, video and/or sound. As opposed to static HTML which has exactly 1 frame, Flash content can have an infinite amount of frames which are played back over time.

Flash is great to provide experiences you could not get otherwise. Animation, video and sound are functions the browser does not (yet) provide, or at least they are not used to the same extend yet by designers. Once the browser will be used to play the same type of multimedia content you will face the same resource usage issues. It takes CPU cycles to decode video, sound and render animation. This is just a fact of life, we are however improving how much is used release after release, something benchmarks can back up.

So, there is a fundamental difference in media type. HTML is static, Flash is not. To put it in terms you might be able to understand:

If you take a picture and print it out you use energy only once and then can continue to view the picture forever without consuming any further energy. If you record a movie you will need some form of machine to play it back which will continue consume energy in form of a projector. The Flash Player is a projector.

Code is being executed deal with it. Same as JavaScript But of course there are open source implementations of javascript so that makes it just super :pinch:

You're apologising for a crap technology and I can't work out why you're doing so.

Flash is our little slice of haven inside the mish-mash of inadequate outdated frameworks that make up the internet. Can it be misused ? Absolutely but so can JavaScript and pretty much everything else.

Show me another framework that provides the same functionality and we will happily use it.

I think the point here is that only Adobe can improve the performance of Flash, whereas any browser vendor can improve the performance of its Canvas tag, JavaScript, or CSS3 animation implementation.

And its that fantastic idea thats responsible for all the cross-browser problems that flash is immune to aswell as the reliance on browser developers to update their fragmented implementations ;)

Edited November 20, 2009 by bob21

[Elliott]

Either your laptop royally sucks (My HTC Shift eats Youtube HD) or your just deliberately blowing this up. Regardless.

Oh, don't give me that ****. Flash performance issues in 10.0 are well documented from just about every camp (Windows, OS X, Linux), especially when trying to decode 720p HD video. CPU usage spikes even on a Core i5 or Core i7.

Code is being executed deal with it.

I think the problem here is that a bunch of animation is being pushed to the CPU when the CPU really shouldn't be the one to deal with it. I know hardware acceleration is coming, but it should've been in Flash for a long time now.

Flash is our little slice of haven inside the mish-mash of inadequate outdated frameworks that make up the internet. Can it be misused ? Absolutely but so can JavaScript and pretty much everything else.

Show me another framework that provides the same functionality and we will happily use it.

Don't get me wrong: Flash is great. For games. For a web app, I'll take JavaScript any day.

And its that fantastic idea thats responsible for all the cross-browser problems that flash is immune to aswell as the reliance on browser developers to update their fragmented implementations ;)

And I think we're finally getting to the point where browser developers are getting on the same page because web developers are itching to use the new standards. Companies like Google and Facebook are pushing the web forward through open standards. Browsers that don't get on board are going to be left behind. Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are obviously leading the push (all three can do all the great parts of HTML5 and CSS3), and IE is playing some (fairly) rapid catchup.

[Raa]

About effin' time too!

But i'll believe it when I see it...

[bob21]

Oh, don't give me that ****. Flash performance issues in 10.0 are well documented from just about every camp (Windows, OS X, Linux), especially when trying to decode 720p HD video. CPU usage spikes even on a Core i5 or Core i7.

lack of GPU accelerated h.264 decoding has been addressed in 10.1. Thats not going to solve the problem of users expecting flash to behave like HTML.

I think the problem here is that a bunch of animation is being pushed to the CPU when the CPU really shouldn't be the one to deal with it. I know hardware acceleration is coming, but it should've been in Flash for a long time now.

Don't get me wrong: Flash is great. For games. For a web app, I'll take JavaScript any day.

GPU acceleration was added last year

And I think we're finally getting to the point where browser developers are getting on the same page because web developers are itching to use the new standards. Companies like Google and Facebook are pushing the web forward through open standards. Browsers that don't get on board are going to be left behind. Safari, Firefox, and Chrome are obviously leading the push (all three can do all the great parts of HTML5 and CSS3), and IE is playing some (fairly) rapid catchup.

Nice sales pitch but its still far too little far too late. And its still going to suffer from the same problems we have today.

[Elliott]

lack of GPU accelerated h.264 decoding has been addressed in 10.1.

In your words: far too little, far too late. It doesn't even work in OS X because they claim Apple doesn't give them access to hardware accelerated H.264 decoding. Funny, because I see plenty of other applications using QuickTime for H.264 decoding. Adobe has this little problem with blaming other developers for their inadequacies (I was reading a thread on Adobe's site earlier where some support tech was blaming Apple for Adobe not having 64-bit versions of their apps out for OS X, when it's really Adobe's fault for still using frameworks that have been deprecated for years), and I'm not amused.

GPU acceleration was added last year

Ah, yea, I was wrong on that. I suppose a lot of developers just don't enable it in their projects.

Far too little far too late.

Really? Because most large web development companies don't seem to think so.

[bob21]

In your words: far too little, far too late. It doesn't even work in OS X because they claim Apple doesn't give them access to hardware accelerated H.264 decoding. Funny, because I see plenty of other applications using QuickTime for H.264 decoding. Adobe has this little problem with blaming other developers for their inadequacies (I was reading a thread on Adobe's site earlier where some support tech was blaming Apple for Adobe not having 64-bit versions of their apps out for OS X, when it's really Adobe's fault for still using frameworks that have been deprecated for years), and I'm not amused.

And what other cross platform framework provides hardware accelerated h.264 decoding exactly ? HTML's video tag is going to face the exact same issues flash used to have .

Ah, yea, I was wrong on that. I suppose a lot of developers just don't enable it in their projects.

Natrully

Really? Because most large web development companies don't seem to think so.

Really ? You-tube, Facebook, Google all utilize flash for both video and applications. Yet the html/Flash comparisons stop there right there.

Its like comparing a bat to c#.

Edited November 20, 2009 by bob21

[rawr_boy81]

Because it shows that there is a double standard in play ,

Hang on, I said that Silverlight would be a great Flash replacement, then listed a condition before I would embrace it - or otherwise you're replacing one proprietary technology with another thus making the situation no better to begin with - that is why I noted open standard. You on the other hand have deliberately ignored what I wrote and taken everything I said completely out of context.

Everyone blows flash CPU usage way out of proportion yet when HTML Finally ( I honestly thought DNF would come first) provides the same functionality (in flash MX2004 with theora)

Pardon? you got half way through that sentence "...yet when HTML Finally..." Finally did what? you have a habit of not only taking peoples sentences out of context you then fail to even finish a train of thought!

Either your laptop royally sucks (My HTC Shift eats Youtube HD) or your just deliberately blowing this up. Regardless.

I have a White MacBook 2.4Ghz/X3100/4GB RAM/Snow Leopard 10.6.2 installed.

Code is being executed deal with it. Same as JavaScript But of course there are open source implementations of javascript so that makes it just super :pinch:

Because I don't hear a giant sucking sound from my browser when executing bog standard javascript.

Flash is our little slice of haven inside the mish-mash of inadequate outdated frameworks that make up the internet. Can it be misused ? Absolutely but so can JavaScript and pretty much everything else.

Show me another framework that provides the same functionality and we will happily use it.

How about Adobe open sourcing their plugin so that problems can be damn well fixed instead of brushed under the carpet.