Adobe Flash Player 10: 3x Mac performance boost? [u]
Friday, July 4, 2008 @ 8:20pm
Adobe this week released Flash Player 10 beta 2, an early preview version of the nearly ubiquitous media plugin for browsers and for Flash/video playback. Version 10 of the player, code named "Astro," brings custom filters and effects, 3D effects, and a new text engine with text layout Components. Most importantly, however, it will bring a huge performance boost for Mac users: "If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster. How will this affect you? Well, OSX device text rendering got a huge performance boost. If you use lots of device text you will see a big difference."
In addition, version 10 adds drawing API enhancements, color management, and visual performance boosts, including GPU Compositing, GPU Blitting as well as an anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1), a Vector Data Type, dynamic streaming, RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol), the Speex Audio Codec, and dynamic sound generation. The Beta 2 build now supports enhanced Sound APIs, Linux WMODE and Video4Linux v2, the ability to "unloadAndStop", and limited full-screen keyboard access.
The pre-release version is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms and is "being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure new features function as expected, existing content plays back correctly, and there are no compatibility issues." The Flash Player 10 beta is available in all supported languages; however, the pre-release installers are only in English, Adobe noted.
The Mac version is now only 1/2 has fast as the Windows version, while still using 100% of all the CPU cycles. Maybe Adobe should use Microsoft's tag "Works Best on Windows".
3x faster is still slower than Flash on Windows.Apple should keep their promises to Adobe, and Adobe should take Apple more seriously. Adobe apps are starting to work better on Windows. Even fonts are working better on Windows, and OSX sucks when it comes to font management.
Is anyone else out there ready to chuck flash out entirely? Aside from its fanboys in the web-design industry, flash doesn't do the rest of us much good- being more widely used as a animated ad platform than for video content. I wish we could agree on a industry standard instead of a proprietary platform when it comes to video plug-ins.
Were it not for a few sites that I need to use on a semi-daily basis, i'd disable it entirely in Safari. It would be nice if there was a block flash button or key-command that we could utilize in safari, then one could just ignore the annoyances and save the proc power when need be.
I do believe that flash guys optimised some stuff in their player. Honestly, I do. But I use my own method of testing flash: ageofconan.com homepage. On my powerbook 1.67 the starting animation of that site is at about 1 frame per 2 seconds. Updated flash player didn't do any good there. In Windows XP the site runs about 20 times faster, and that's on very very outdated box.
One advise to Adobe: rewrite Mac version from scratch.
...which typically timeout my patience while loading driving me away from rather than attracting me to commercial sites...
These seeming webmaster wet dreams seem increasingly focussed on 'technology' at the expense of clear communication & efficacious provision of useful information...
Is anyone else out there ready to chuck flash out entirely?
Apple is taking care of that for us, and I'm very happy about it.
Adobe touting how 'well' the new Flash is doing is just a last ditch effort to avoid falling into insignificance - the writing's on the wall, thanks to iPhone, that Apple won't be supporting Flash. The litmus test will be the day the next version of OS X / Safari will ship without Flash pre-installed. This may not be Snow Leopard, but speculatively the version following it. The plans to do so have already been decided upon, I'm sure.
This is no different than Apple at one point stopping to include Stuffit Expander in their OS X distribution - the lesson is the same: get bloated, and have user hostile management, and Apple will drop you.
This has happened for Stuffit, it is happening very actively to Microsoft's MacBU Entourage 2008 (to be followed by the rest of Office), and will happen to Flash as well.
I'm having a problem where all flash video is now rendered in green and black blocks. Beta 1 and Flash 9 did not have this problem. Anybody else seeing this?
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