The difference is that Flash is produced solely by Adobe. Their rendering technology is closed source and produced by a single team of developers. No one can contribute to their performance except them. There are many browser developers working on their technologies, and Webkit is one of the largest currently. It's an open source project that any good developer can contribute to. Mozilla is the same. This means that if one browser is doing really power intensive animations, you can either switch to another or contribute to the performance of your browser by writing better animation code and submitting a patch.
We're a long way off from web ads being as animation intensive as the latest 3D games. Browser rendering technology can reach the point where the animations that we're used to seeing these days can be optimized quite well, especially if the graphics card is involved. Real strides in the power of HTML5 animation has only reached an awesome level in the past year or so. Next year things will be even better, and it will take advertisers a lot longer to move on from Flash.
As for ad blockers, they have been blocking non-flash content for years now. Google ads are HTML and javascript based, and they are blocked just fine. Same with popups: all javascript. Most advertisers are not going to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to get around ad blockers, since they work with mass distribution and an awful lot of punters don't care about downloading and using an ad blocker. The only sites that try really hard to make you see or click on an ad are usually scams anyway.
We're going to get 3D ads. This is not a maybe; the ability is there, so it will happen. Anything else is wishful thinking.
And they won't be rotating cube demos - no, the designers will instance an entire 3D engine, and they'll start dumping in expensive shaders and high-poly models that "work for them" on a high-end desktop. And then web sites load three or four of these ads. No optimization or acceleration is going to tame such monstrosities. Your netbook might hang just trying to load the page, forcing you to use an ad blocker whether or not you want one.
The long-term solution is for ad networks to minimize client-side tricks and stick to safer performance envelopes(images or video).
Thanks for that example, it's been mentioned several times that the Flash technology isn't the only cause of the CPU being pegged but the code that banner developers are writing as well and now I've got a good sample to share.
98% CPU usage when the tab is active.
I've got an iMac, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GM RAM
When the tab is active the CPU usage for Firefox is at 98%, when it isn't the active tab it goes down to 12%, that is interesting. I wonder if Flash stops on inactive tabs currently. I know you can program for that functionality but is it in there by default now?
This is how flash player now works, with the latest release it drops the frame rate of the flash movie to something like 2-3 frames per second if the movie is not visible in the browser.
Flash player is also single threaded so executes code on a single cpu core, but it does rendering using multiple cores. If you are seeing a single core spike to 100% usage then it is a sign of badly coded actionscript (onFrameEnter event handlers are very popular with designers who cut and paste as2 code), if you are seeing multiple cores at around 100% then it is a rendering issue, i.e. trying to redraw the entire stage every frame and/or a very high frame rate (> 30 fps).
I'm not sure if code attached to the frame in the Flash IDE would also cause multiple cores to spike, or if this also executes in the single threaded cycle. But again, having actionscript inside the .fla instead of separate .as files is a sign of a poorly designed/developed flash application.
Basically, I don't care. Flash is awful in Linux. I can't even use it in Chrome really, I have it disabled and only use it in Firefox. It's shocking how little I actually miss. I don't see how the blocking game is going to be that much different than what it is now with AdBlock... it blocks all sorts of ads right now, it's hardly limited to flash ads.
Not to mention the author can't read.
"As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X"
is the exact opposite of
"Currently it sucks, but I also don’t care about the future"
It says that there are gains by DISABLING flash... and yes, I'll keep my fingers in my ears if it keeps pushing HTML5 and related technologies forward. I hate flash. It is a daily annoyance.
I agree that Flash is awful. But there are two different arguments here:
1) Flash is awful
2) Flash is the _only_ contributor to power drain so lets vilify it, and let's ignore HTML5 ads for now. (this was DaringFireball's implication)
The article does a wonderful job of demonstrating a very near future where John Gruber's Macbook will have 2 hours of battery life thanks to spinning gerbil HTML5 ads.
Again, I'm all for disabling Flash, but DF's constant championing of HTML5 as a panacea for all of Flash's forthcomings needs to be stopped (it's becoming a religion).
If anything, this article encourages a more constructive discussion than the trolling DF does.
Agreed. I use 64-bit Chrome in Ubuntu 10.10 and it's unusable. I'm not sure if it's better in 32-bit, but there's frankly no way I'm going to compromise on my browser choice purely because of Adobe's incompetence. It usually freezes or drops down to maybe 5 FPS when I make a video full screen, it constantly uses a ridiculous amount of CPU time, it crashes tabs, and the font rendering is as shitty as ever.
I love when videos are on Vimeo because all of their videos play natively, and when I click on a YouTube video, I'm always hoping that it isn't one of the Flash-only videos that I need to switch to Firefox to watch. HTML5 might be in its infancy, but it already sucks a lot less than Flash, at least for those of us that aren't using Windows.
The issue isn't just performance—it's who I want controlling web technologies. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are open standards that anyone can implement. Whether or not the performance is the same right now, I have way more faith in Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera than I have in Adobe (and if they all drop the ball, someone else will pick it up). Adobe definitely has talented engineers, but they've demonstrated again and again that they're just not capable of making Flash stable and efficient. I'm not sure if this is the legacy cruft built up in Flash, a lack of interest in performance on platforms besides Windows, or just pure incompetence, but I don't care. They've had over 5 years (over 10 if you count Macromedia) to work their shit out, and they haven't.
Flash may have had a role back when web technologies just weren't up the task for displaying any kind of rich content, but that day has passed. It's telling that the vast majority of articles I've read defending Flash are written by people who directly profit from Flash continuing to be a relevant technology. Some are Flash evangelists, others are just people who decided to hitch their careers to Flash and are just now coming to terms with what a bad decision that was, and a few just plain don't understand what they're talking about (e.g. Dave Winer). This author isn't one of them—he's actually provided a reasoned argument, and the awesome CSS3 stuff he's been putting out shows that he's not just blindly defending the only tool he knows—but people like him seem to be few and far between.
I don't want this to be a "works for me" response, but I'm currently running Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) on 64-bit and for me the Flash Player performs excellent. I can watch hours of YouTube videos, switching to full-screen and back, without a hitch. My primary browser is Chrome (installed from the Ubuntu repos, not Google's nightly builds) but Flash Player also runs just fine in FireFox. It might be worth checking for the latest version of Flash Player.
I'm using the latest 10.2 beta release. It's actually a marginal improvement over the official 10.1 package in the Ubuntu repositories. I'm using a Lenovo X201 with a common Intel graphics chip (I think it's referred to as "Intel HD Graphics"). The chip isn't the speediest out there (games are out of the question), but it's more than fast enough for HD video.
I don't need any unsupported closed-source drivers, and my system is basically all Intel hardware, which as far as I'm aware are the most Linux-friendly components out there. I'm using a more-or-less stock Ubuntu install. One thing worth pointing out is that performance seems to be worse in 10.10 compared to 10.04, but I'm hesitant to blame Canonical, as Flash seems to be basically the only thing suffering.
The thing is, I'm probably in the top 1% of computer users in terms of competence. If I can't figure out how to make Flash work on my laptop, how the hell is my Mom going to? If it won't just work on one of the most ideal Linux environments, something is fundamentally wrong.
We're a long way off from web ads being as animation intensive as the latest 3D games. Browser rendering technology can reach the point where the animations that we're used to seeing these days can be optimized quite well, especially if the graphics card is involved. Real strides in the power of HTML5 animation has only reached an awesome level in the past year or so. Next year things will be even better, and it will take advertisers a lot longer to move on from Flash.
As for ad blockers, they have been blocking non-flash content for years now. Google ads are HTML and javascript based, and they are blocked just fine. Same with popups: all javascript. Most advertisers are not going to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to get around ad blockers, since they work with mass distribution and an awful lot of punters don't care about downloading and using an ad blocker. The only sites that try really hard to make you see or click on an ad are usually scams anyway.