So how exactly would you handle drawing within a browser plugin? I've pasted this elsewhere in this thread, but for the sake of showing that it isn't as simple as you and others make it seem: http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html
CoreAnimation came out a few months before Adobe released Flash 10 - nowhere near soon enough for 10 to make use of it. 10.1 will.
Nah. More like multimedia on Linux is a mess, and it's not a big enough target for Adobe to give a crap.
First off, I was wrong for using the term "low-level". That's what happens when you don't have enough coffee in the morning. That was my paraphrasing of various Adobe team blog posts that stated they didn't have the APIs available to provide good performance on OS X.
CoreAnimation hasn't been around forever. I won't argue with you that Adobe can be slow to act at times (Flash 10 came out too soon after OS X 10.5 was released to make use of CA), but acting as if the entire thing has been their fault from day 1 is disingenuous.
You're trying to compare a browser plugin to a standalone application? Browser plugins have an extremely limited subset of API's they can call, as well as seemingly arbitrary limitations placed upon them.
But let's talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. I'm happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.
Flash on OS X is crap because Apple refused to give the plugin the kind of low-level access it needed. The newest version does a lot to ameliorate that. Flash 10.1 (now in RC) uses Core Animation, so you should see a significant improvement in performance.
Yes, Firefox has some issues. Yes, the Mozilla team needs to fix them. However, I think this article is being overly sensationalistic (surprise, surprise). In a wonderful bout of irony, the same forces that made long-standing IE users jump to FF are keeping them using FF. Some are averse to learning a new UI/control scheme, others needs certain extensions to remain productive. Then there are a few, like me, who don't see the performance/crashing issues that others report. I'm not saying that they don't exist, just that I haven't experienced them.
Additionally, FF has been approved for use in many businesses, as well as the DoD/DHS to run on their networks. Chrome, AFAIK, hasn't.
With these forces slowing down non-Firefox adoption, the Mozilla team has bought themselves some crucial time in the quest to right some of their browser's weaknesses. Hopefully they'll be able to meet that challenge, and, from reading the various blogs published to Planet Mozilla, I'm fairly confident that they will.
Mentioning that you work/have worked for Microsoft on Slashdot is one of the quickest ways to a flaming.
Indeed. This past weekend I discovered that Chrome does not allow content scripts to edit page values and functions without some annoying event throwing architecture. As someone who writes a greasemonkey script to add features to/cope with annoying websites, I find this inexcusable. I think what really grinds my gears is that these scripts used to be able to work in Chrome *until* Google threw the switch for official extension support.
I'm running the official 5.0 on my Storm 9530 w/BIS and still have the same 4 search providers.
Any chance that Verizon accidentally pushed a malformed service book?
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek
