First it was heat waves, then earthquakes, then storms, then Steve Jobs resigns, then a hurricane; natural disasters all. Now I notice that Adobe’s Flash Player actually works better on my Mac than a year ago. Are these not sure signs of an apocalypse, a world wide catastrophe of epic proportions? What’s next? Free Kindles?
Is Flash Really Better?
This is not a scientific observation. But it’s an observation. The latest Flash plugin hasn’t crashed Safari on my Mac. Not once. That’s after opening half a dozen windows, each with half a dozen web sites, each site with more than a few Flash ads floating around?
What’s up, Tiger Lily? Is Adobe trying to build a better product? Maybe that public scolding Steve Jobs gave Adobe a few years ago had some positive impact. The new Flash is still a plugin, but resides as a Preference Pane, so controls are accessed in your Mac’s System Preferences.
Flash allows local Storage of files. And, there’s a Camera and Mic option.
Camera and Mic? I have visions of advertisers watching me use my Mac while I’m at home in my underwear.
Advanced settings are straightforward, too, including a version check for Flash updates. It only checks. It doesn’t download and install an update.
Without question, Flash is the utility I love to hate. Unfortunately, much of web video remains available only to those with a Flash player, so it’s a necessary evil. Adobe has worked on Flash to improve performance on a Mac. CPU usage is down from previous versions. So are crashes, even with many open web pages running Flash ads.
If this kind of performance improvement continues, how long will it be before we see Flash running on an iPhone or iPad?
It’s a little better. Adobe put a little effort into Flash for once. But its still a resource hog and still has constant security issues.
Jeffrey, you’re spot on. Flash has improved, but the pace is anything but quick. Typical Adobe. The company is just too big and too slow to move forward in any timely manner.
I can open half a dozen Safari pages, and each with four or five tabs, all running web pages, and it doesn’t suck up too much CPU, and only occasionally crashes.
And that’s an improvement.
Yeah, it’s an improvement. Now it’s all the way up to mediocre. Whatever Adobe has done to Flash it’s too little and too late. They can’t kill that dinosaur fast enough.
Is it any wonder Adobe has HTML5 tools already on the market? They’re in danger of being left behind, the holders of old, bloated, expensive technology tools.
Recent changes include choking SWFs on background pages or otherwise offscreen… if you’re using a recent Safari then the new CoreAnimation reduces the old browser-redraw costs. More info:
Here and Here.
jd/adobe