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Adobe Uber Alles

Okay, not even close. From the release notes for the Flash 10.1 beta:

H.264 Hardware acceleration support on Windows only. Why? Well according to Adobe:

There's also no support for H.264 hardware acceleration on anything but Windows, because "Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs," but to keep torches and pitchforks at bay, Adobe is pressing on to "evaluate adding the feature."

I don't know enough to say if this is crap or not, but if anyone does know, please, feel free to expound on it in the comments.

It supports multitouch and Gestures, but the beta only supports it in Windows and Mobile devices. Yeah, because it's not like anyone on the Mac uses multitouch and gestures. GPU Acceleration? Mobile devices only. Why?

Adobe's reasoning for only supporting GPU-based rendering on smartphones is that it "decreases performance [in some cases]" and "driver support varies wildly," even though Mac OS X has supported native GPU-compositing ever since it introduced Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.2.

Oh, and in cases where the Flash Plugin runs out of memory, it handles it "better":

Flash Player 10.1 prevents out-of-memory browser crashes by shutting down instances where a SWF attempts to allocate more memory than is available on the device. When a SWF tries to allocate more memory than is available on a device, Flash Player 10.1 adds logic to shut down Flash Player to prevent the browser from crashing. Users will receive notification to restart the SWF, or will see a notice to refresh the page if all instances must be shutdown.

I suppose instead of crashing my browser, it'll just ask me to restart? Big improvement. Of course, is this on non-mobile devices? Personally, I like the Safari on Mac OS X 10.6 method of just killing the plugin.

There's support for content protection, but output protection is Windows only. Again, it's not like anyone watches movies or streams on a Mac. (Yeah, I know content protection is stupid, however, if you can't watch the shit you want to watch, the stupidity of content protection is kind of a nonissue)

Oh, and on a Mac, it may use more CPU than expected when idle. No, really, they finally admit it:

[FP-2009] CPU Utilization in an idle app is more than expected on Mac. (2294236)

But it's not all bad. Cocoa browsers get scroll-wheel support.

w00t.

You know, it would be a lot easier to believe that Adobe considers anything but Windows as a strategic platform if they didn't do stupid shit like this, and you know, actually acted like !Windows really matters to them. Considering how little this offers to Mac users, why the fuck even download it?

Categories: Adobe

Posted by John C. Welch at 15:25 | Permalink

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Okay, not even close. From the release notes for the Flash 10.1 beta:\n\nH.264 Hardware acceleration support on Windows only. Why? Well according to Adobe:

There's also no support for H.264 hardware acceleration on anything but Windows, because \"Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs,\" but to keep torches and pitchforks at bay, Adobe is pressing on to \"evaluate adding the feature.\"

\n\nI don't know enough to say if this is crap or not, but if anyone does know, please, feel free to expound on it in the comments.\n\nIt supports multitouch and Gestures, but the beta only supports it in Windows and Mobile devices. Yeah, because it's not like anyone on the Mac uses multitouch and gestures. GPU Acceleration? Mobile devices only. Why?

Adobe's reasoning for only supporting GPU-based rendering on smartphones is that it \"decreases performance [in some cases]\" and \"driver support varies wildly,\" even though Mac OS X has supported native GPU-compositing ever since it introduced Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.2.

\n\nOh, and in cases where the Flash Plugin runs out of memory, it handles it \"better\":

Flash Player 10.1 prevents out-of-memory browser crashes by shutting down instances where a SWF attempts to allocate more memory than is available on the device. When a SWF tries to allocate more memory than is available on a device, Flash Player 10.1 adds logic to shut down Flash Player to prevent the browser from crashing. Users will receive notification to restart the SWF, or will see a notice to refresh the page if all instances must be shutdown.

\nI suppose instead of crashing my browser, it'll just ask me to restart? Big improvement. Of course, is this on non-mobile devices? Personally, I like the Safari on Mac OS X 10.6 method of just killing the plugin. \n\nThere's support for content protection, but output protection is Windows only. Again, it's not like anyone watches movies or streams on a Mac. (Yeah, I know content protection is stupid, however, if you can't watch the shit you want to watch, the stupidity of content protection is kind of a nonissue)\n\nOh, and on a Mac, it may use more CPU than expected when idle. No, really, they finally admit it:

[FP-2009] CPU Utilization in an idle app is more than expected on Mac. (2294236)

\n\nBut it's not all bad. Cocoa browsers get scroll-wheel support. \n\nw00t.\n\nYou know, it would be a lot easier to believe that Adobe considers anything but Windows as a strategic platform if they didn't do stupid shit like this, and you know, actually acted like !Windows really matters to them. Considering how little this offers to Mac users, why the fuck even download it?