Hey Adobe; get your Flash together
Flash sucks! Really! It crashes my Firefox all too often (every few days, especially when behind our company proxy) and playing Flash movies consumes way too much CPU-power for my liking. Apparently Mozilla and Adobe are blaming each other with regard to some of these problems, but this really seems to be a Flash-issue;
- The problem (flash crashing) exists in Google Chrome as well, but thanks to Chrome’s isolated processes, it doesn’t freeze the browser, you’ll see the “sad plugin” instead of the swf-movie.
- Chrome’s task manager also clearly demonstrates the excessive CPU-usage of the Flash-plugin when playing an FLV-file (think youtube, dailymotion, …)
- The crashing problem is supposed to be gone in Flash 10 beta, so it seems Flash 9 specific
Moreover, I found a great howto on “Bort’s w3bl0g” about how to wrap Flash inside NSPluginWrapper in (Ubuntu) Linux, isolating Firefox from Flash-crashes. I’ll try that over the weekend, but it sure looks great!
But anyway; Adobe, get your shit together!
Philip Paeps
19 Sep 08 at 13:57
Why install it? I can’t imagine a need.
frank
19 Sep 08 at 14:13
why, i didn’t know there was a flash-plugin for lynx philip?
but seriously; i enjoy online vids a lot and when having to choose between wmv, qt and flv, i’ll happily go for the flash video solution.
i’d love youtube and the likes to offer theora (esp. since firefox3.1 is expected to include native ogg vorbis/theora decoders), but until then i do need my flash-thingie.
Philip Paeps
19 Sep 08 at 14:43
There are a number of Mozilla Firefox extensions which allow you to fetch the “flash video” so that it can be played in a real video player. I use dwhelper.
I don’t understand why a browser should implement video-decoding. Next it’ll start playing music too.
frank
19 Sep 08 at 21:29
well, browsers decode images (gif/jpg/png) as well, so why stop there, esp. if it can boost the adoption of open source/ open standards-based codecs such as ogg vorbis and theora?
Firefox 3.5 and tinyvid.tv do Ogg/Theora | futtta's blog
24 May 09 at 07:15
[...] vs proprietary (Adobe Flash with VP6-codec) argument, using video will allow us to get rid of the memory (and cpu) hog Flash can be (or at least to replace it by another cpu-hog [...]