In response to one rather trollish comment, John Nack says:
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[Way to parrot Welch. Anyway, you're of course right that Flash should never crash. My beef is that suddenly we hear this HUGE groundswell of people saying that Flash is bringing them to ruin. Could it be that maybe--just maybe--some of these claims are overstated out of some tribalism (a desire to be close to Apple)? I mean, people identify with groups of multimillionaires who theoretically represent some nearby city in sports, so it's not hard to see why they want to identify with the people who make the devices they use all day.
I'm not saying that Flash never crashes. I'm saying that a certain corps of people are eagerly overstating the problem out of some desire to bond with Apple, to be part of something bigger and shinier than themselves.
The beauty part for them is that the claims are unquantifiable and unfalsifiable: I guarantee you're not seeing crash log data from Apple, so unless we go to your house and watch all day to see whether your browser ever crashes (and if then the problem is actually due to Flash & not, say, Saft, Glims, Inquisitor, etc.), we're talking about impressions, not real data. --J.]
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So if you're having Flash issues in OSX, odds are you're just a lying fanboy.
[edit an hour later: that's how I read it, and I could of course be off base. I mean, he isn't calling everyone a liar but you can't really look at a large group of people and say "50% of you are full of shit" without casting aspersions on all of them. Also, as someone who has been bitching about Flash on Linux and OSX for most of this century, I take offense to the idea that "everything was peachy keen until Apple whipped up a fuss over nothing" (again, I paraphrase from my own perspective).]
In response to one rather trollish comment on HN, Spikefu says:
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[Adobe can't fix what they can't reproduce. I'm sure they work very hard to eliminate any and all instability from the Flash Player on all platforms. If they don't, they end up living in a world of PR hell.]
Currently there are 4 bugs containing the text 'crash' where the environment is OSX. None of them have any votes, watchers or comments apart from one which has a comment from Adobe saying they can't reproduce it. On that evidence, it's hard to see why Adobe would believe crashing on OSX is a critical problem.
Adobe's JIRA system for reporting bugs is worse than useless. We found multiple crashes in the Flash Player that were triggered by customer-created content and reported them to Adobe with reproduction cases and details, and they didn't even respond to our bug filings for months. They wouldn't even let us pay them for some sort of support contract.
While "lying fanboy" is a little harsh, I think there's something behind the misrepresenting how serious the crashes are and that their unquantifiable and unfalsifiable. I suspect most reports are anecdotal, like "Safari crashed while I was playing Desktop Tower Defense, and I was just about to have the highest score ever!", which is more of an emotional position than objective/analytical. At this point, it's in no one's best interest, other than consumers, to collect information on crashes and do something about them. Steve Jobs would actually have to (gasp!) eat his words if it's not flash that is crashing and Adobe would actually have to (gasp!) fix the bugs if it is. And bug fixing doesn't make headlines. This disagreement between Jobs and Adobe gets the pageviews.
Fedora 12 has an "automatic bug reporting tool" that is annoying in that it often shows up when you aren't expecting it, or when you know something crashed that Fedora folks can't do anything about -- so I've usually opted not to submit the things it wants to report. But that may be a losing battle in the long run, since more data collected could actually get bugs fixed, and then there are statistics on how frequently crashes are a problem for people. Thing is, I know how much bogus stuff gets collected with these kinds of tools, and it's difficult to sift through, so in some sense, I think I'm actually helping them by not submitting things I think may be bogus.
Anecdotal or not, the only time my browser ever crashes (at least since Java applets stopped showing up) is immediately upon opening a page with streaming video. Whether it's Apple or Adobe at fault, I don't care, but it seems to be exclusively triggered by Flash content.
Are there many people here running OS X that don't have problems apparently caused by Flash?
Of course you don't care whose fault it is, you just want it fixed. That's why I pointed out that it's only in the best interest of consumers that the bugs get fixed.
It seems that neither Adobe nor Apple actually want to make a good experience for users, flash or otherwise, because independent of whose fault it is the problems are not getting addressed. I'm reminded of http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html, where Microsoft actually cared about the user experience enough to insert a massive kludge even though the bug wasn't their fault. And since the problems are not getting addressed, I'd be leery of using either Apple or Adobe products. Apple because they would rather destroy a product they don't like even though the users do, and Adobe because of the way they treat their products after release. Apple's defense is that they prefer the new and shiny vs the old and busted (which are subjective measurements). For years Apple was behind Flash, it was one of the reasons to use a Mac, at least for flash development. Apple was also behind Firewire for years, it was so much better than USB. Then all of a sudden it wasn't, much to the detriment of those people who had bought all that highend firewire hardware. Now, this usually ends up being good for the consumer, which is why Jobs has the reputation he does, and in Apple's defense, their standard MO of controlling the entire platform means they have to make the "hard" decisions about what they support, and it usually ends up being good all around, but the transition, when Jobs changes his mind, can be a real bitch.
Apple was the first computer manufacturer to adopt USB on a wide scale (for which they were ridiculed at the time). Firewire remains the better technology of the two, but it is accordingly more expensive to implement; Apple still supports it fully on their pro computers. I use plenty of "highend firewire hardware" on a daily basis with my brand new MBP without issue. What, exactly, are you referring to?
How quickly we (all) forget ( http://www.google.com/search?q=apple+removes+firewire ). I misspoke, firewire 400 _was_ removed from a number of devices, as part of the regular upgrade path/hardware refresh, because "USB 2.0 won the connectivity fight in the lower end of the market". Despite me not being specific enough, and that Apple _currently_ ships a number of devices with firewire support, the fact remains that Apple does make hardware decisions based on their perception of user-experience, what they want to support, and which direction they want the market to go in -- I'm not sure how anyone can disagree with that, as I'm sure everyone makes decisions on what they want to support (other than maybe IE6), sometimes leaving users and customers in the lurch who are used to, or have a vested interest, in doing things the old, or a certain, way.
much to the detriment of those people who had bought all that highend firewire hardware
What detriment? Apple only ships two models without FireWire, neither of which cater to the sort of person who owns a lot of high-end FireWire kit anyway.
OS X gives you the option to submit a report to Apple after an app crashes. The report contains stack traces and you can view the traces in the dialog box before sending. Every time Safari crashes for me (and for anyone else I know) it's within the Flash plugin.
What I've heard (and I don't have access to Apple's source records) is that most of these failures are when the plugin requests more memory, and the browser responds ungracefully. Flash just triggered it but didn't cause it.
But until Apple gets out there with clear and honest executive communication, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.
(On the good side, Safari team has been permitted to communicate with the Player team, and some of these problems may be addressed. We're still seeking Apple Corps approval to decompress video off the CPU on their computers. It's their business decision to make.)
Apple has publicly stated that more than half of the crash reports they get through the crash reporting tool built in to Mac OS X are due to browser plugins. This is why they implemented a plugin encapsulation system for Safari on Snow Leopard: when a plugin (Flash) goes down, it no longer takes the whole browser with it.
It is entirely unreasonable to assume that there is any statistically significant proportion of those plugin crashes that aren't Flash (well, maybe a few Java crashes...). Apple can't publicly blame Flash with any specificity, because they can't have Flash for OS X get abandoned until their mobile strategy has mostly killed Flash anyways. But they still have the raw data and stack traces. And that data indicates that Flash is by far the most crash-prone app on most Macs.
<em>"It is entirely unreasonable to assume that there is any statistically significant proportion of those plugin crashes that aren't Flash"</em>
I've got a slow connection on my Mac at home, and have consistently used Flash-blockers and ad-blockers over the years to control what's pushed to me. Even so, Firefox and Safari regularly stall and require a restart. May be my Mac, though.
That's not much of a reply, much less a refutation.
The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins. Java applets et al are so rare that Flash might as well be the only plugin that is used.
Whether or not your web browser crashes when it isn't using Flash is completely off-topic, unless you are trying to insinuate that Apple can't even tell from a stack dump where the crash originated. In which case, you're taking an awfully roundabout way to calling Apple incompetent liars.
> "The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins.
Indeterminate. The logs show that Flash made a call. It didn't show where that call went when it failed. (I usually run Safari and Firefox in parallel on my Mac because both have stability problems, despite using a Flash blocker.) Most of the Player code is the same across OS, only the outer wrappers and connecting APIs differ.
On the happy side, there has recently been some increased cooperation with the Safari team, and when combined with the mobile optimizations you can expect to see some of the gains described by Kevin Lynch:
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_...
Sure. Most of the crashing doesn't occur in other forums, where people post with their real identities. It's only when Apple business models are threatened that we see all these "ray@gmail" and "acey@mailinator.com" come out.
If people were straight up, and focused on trying to solve a problem, that'd be one thing. Sudden swells of anonymous turfing is another. Apple won't even go on-the-record with their executive-level smears, for goshsakes... what kind of corporate culture is that?
Adobe has been an abusive monopoly in the streaming video market. It's only when a large company controversially decides to try to break that monopoly that people come out of the woodwork to cheer what may be the downfall of a product that truly sucks. Prior to Apple taking on Flash, it was a foregone conclusion that Flash sucks, but it was a necessary evil.
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[Way to parrot Welch. Anyway, you're of course right that Flash should never crash. My beef is that suddenly we hear this HUGE groundswell of people saying that Flash is bringing them to ruin. Could it be that maybe--just maybe--some of these claims are overstated out of some tribalism (a desire to be close to Apple)? I mean, people identify with groups of multimillionaires who theoretically represent some nearby city in sports, so it's not hard to see why they want to identify with the people who make the devices they use all day.
I'm not saying that Flash never crashes. I'm saying that a certain corps of people are eagerly overstating the problem out of some desire to bond with Apple, to be part of something bigger and shinier than themselves.
The beauty part for them is that the claims are unquantifiable and unfalsifiable: I guarantee you're not seeing crash log data from Apple, so unless we go to your house and watch all day to see whether your browser ever crashes (and if then the problem is actually due to Flash & not, say, Saft, Glims, Inquisitor, etc.), we're talking about impressions, not real data. --J.]
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So if you're having Flash issues in OSX, odds are you're just a lying fanboy.
[edit an hour later: that's how I read it, and I could of course be off base. I mean, he isn't calling everyone a liar but you can't really look at a large group of people and say "50% of you are full of shit" without casting aspersions on all of them. Also, as someone who has been bitching about Flash on Linux and OSX for most of this century, I take offense to the idea that "everything was peachy keen until Apple whipped up a fuss over nothing" (again, I paraphrase from my own perspective).]