Flash Beta 10.1 — Take The Pill, Ease The Pain?

I’ve been obscenely obsessed with the back and forth between John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Adobe’s official bloggers. While John Gruber is publicly cheering on Apple for not including Flash on the iPhone, Adobe is defending their technology, as well as promising improvements.¹

John Gruber:

It’s probably pretty clear to regular DF readers that I don’t care for Flash, and that I’m hoping Apple never includes it in the iPhone OS. Might as well make my biases clear. Why? At the core, because Flash is the only de facto web standard based on a proprietary technology. [...] There are also practical issues. One, Flash’s aforementioned crashiness on Mac OS X. Second, crashiness aside, its performance on Mac OS X is not as good as it is on Windows. And for video playback specifically, Flash’s performance pales compared to H.264 played through QuickTime.

Prompting replies from Adobe’s John Nack:

Adobe isn’t in the Flash business. Seriously. It isn’t in the Photoshop business, or the Acrobat business, or the [take-your-pick product name] business, either. It’s in the helping people communicate business. [...] Flash has stepped in to fill some gaps heretofore left by other technologies. It is, however, just one possible means to an end–always has been. Adobe will of course continue to invest in making Flash better, and it’ll keep investing in other ways to help creative people reach customer eyeballs.

And Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch:

In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering. [...] With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.

Fascinating stuff, right?

While I absolutely agree with John Gruber in terms of Flash being a de facto web standard based on a proprietary technology which needs to be replaced (at least for video playback) by HTML5 — I’ll still need to rely on Flash until the transition is complete. Therefore, I find myself in a weird juxtaposition of hoping for Flash’s demise on one hand, while rooting for the Adobe engineering team to make noticeable improvements on the other.

Lucky for me, Adobe has made available a public beta of Flash 10.1 for OSX with Flash engineer Tinic Uro providing some interesting info on Flash & Core Animation, highlighting some of the bottlenecks that the teams are now overcoming.

Flash Player 10.1 implements the Core Animation drawing model [...] Instead of using a CGImageRef + CGContextDrawImage to get the bits to screen we pass a CAOpenGLLayer to Safari and use an OpenGL texture of type GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE_ARB to get our bits to the screen. [...] Given the now almost perfect integration of Core Animation plugins into Safari I hope that future versions of the Flash Player will take advantage of more capabilities of OpenGL.

Techie stuff, indeed. Don’t worry, you don’t need to understand the CL_TEXTURE_Jibberish. The gist of it is coming down to this: If you’re running Flash 10.1 on OSX 10.6 with Safari 4 you should notice some distinct performance improvements. And while I’m not claiming to understand all the nitty-gritty developer-talk either, I am able to see some fascinating improvements with my very own eyes thanks to my (completely unscientific) testing methods.

And so can you!

See the video below? You should be able to play this embedded 720p Vimeo video on any recent Mac running Flash 10.0. Now try to blow it up full screen on a 27 or 30inch screen (little icon on the bottom right-hand corner). See the difference? STUTTER-CENTRAL!²

Now upgrade to Flash 10.1 beta for OSX (if you’re into that new-frontier kinda stuff — don’t come yelling at us if it breaks your stuff) and re-run the video above. Still runs fine embedded? Great. Now blow it up full screen. Whoa! Smooth as silk. Even on that 30inch Cinema Display.

Pretty nifty, eh?

So while I’ll still be impatiently waiting for HTML5 to mature to the point of replacing proprietary Flash as the main resource for web-video — I do appreciate and take notice of the improvements Flash 10.1 will offer in the meantime.

Hopefully this will ease the transitional pain. I already took the pill. Will you?

Questions or comments? Let me know: @eierund on twitter.

1. Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch also stated “I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs” less than a week before Product Manager Emmy Huang admits to shipping Flash with a known bug since September 2008. Some reassurance. [↩]
2. Tests performed on 2006 MacPro/2x Xeon Woodcrest 2.66GHz Dual-Core / 30inch display & 2009 iMac/3.06GHz quad-core Core i5 / 27inch display. [↩]