Flash Still Fizzles on OS X? Version 10 Benchmarked!
The iPhone runs mobile OS X, a stripped down and highly optimized subset of Mac OS X. Adobe has just released Flash 10, including a version for Apple's platform. Does this new version finally address all the bugginess and bloat, that has long plagued the non-Windows version of Flash? What about the general privacy and security concerns around Flash cookies and exploits? Ars Technica put the new builds through their paces, and Daring Fireball sums it up thusly:
Performance still sucks on Mac OS X compared to Windows Vista. Using the exact same computer (four-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM), Hulu video playback consumes 56 percent CPU on Mac OS X 10.5 vs. just 7 percent on Vista.
John Gruber updates his post to say it's not as bad as he first thought, but 2 times slower is still 2 (or more!) times too many. The iPhone is not as forgiving as a desktop or even laptop computer. If Adobe really wants Flash on the iPhone -- as they keep harping to the media -- why not make a highly optimized, super-fast build that would befit the OS X platform? You know, like Apple has done with Quicktime X?
There are 3 comments. Add yours.
frankly i'm glad flash is not coming to iphone. w/ standardized video support coming in the next iteration of html and powerful javascript engines being developed (squirrelfish, v8, etc), i hope that the need for flash/silverlight will be greatly depreciated on desktops as well.
I hope flash comes to the iPhone soon... I really wanna be able to watch embeded videos at will but it probably won't anytime soon. (sigh...)
@mr. Hi-Definition
I really think Flash sucks.
Club Penguin (a flash game) is incredibly slow, no 3D engine.
RuneScape (a Java game) gives you a 3D vision, and even though Club Penguin has no 3D engine, RuneScape is faster! I think Apple should put Java on iPhone, not Flash!