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Flash does not like Android
IT IS STARTING TO LOOK LIKE Adobe's plan to move away from Apple land and into the world of Android might run aground.
Web standards developer Jeff Croft wrote in his blog that Ryan Stewart, a Flash platform evangelist at Adobe, showed him a demo of Flash Player 10.1 running on his Nexus One phone.
Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters.
Then, he pulled up the same thing on his Nexus One. The site's progress bar filled in and the 3D world appeared for a few seconds before the browser crashed.
Apparently Ryan said "Whoops! Well, it's beta, and this is an intense example - let's try it again." He tried it again and got the same result.
So he said to the audience, "Well, this one isn't going to work, but does anyone have a Flash site they'd like to see running?" A wag shouted out Hulu and Ryan sheepishly said, "Hulu doesn't work."
Croft said that Flash on Android is beta and so it is expected that it's crashy and buggy at this stage. He said that Adobe should not show off buggy software at this point.
We guess that the world plus dog has a perception problem that Adobe's software is buggy, therefore anything that it does that goes wrong falls into Apple's spin about the product. µ
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Works fine too on my HTC Desire.
I'm looking at ECO ZOO on my HTC Desire right now, stock web browser and it works perfectly, so I'm not sure what the difference between the two phones are. I'm able to zoom in on the flash screen and all the 3d animations and sounds are smooth and crisp. The desire browser has never crashed on me and can even run our AFL flash websites here which runs slowly on most other browsers.
Flash streams just fine on my Moto Droid, when it works (Skyfire browser beta). The interface issues have to be worked out, but Flash can run smooth and clean on a Droid with Android 2.1.
I realize that the Flash it is running is not embedded, but they've just got to work some of these kinks out.
I completely agree that it was premature to demonstrate until you're absolutely sure it'll work.
It reminds me of Bill Gates showing off a buggy version of Windows and getting the "blue screen of death".
Never rush a product to market. Adobe's finghting a PR war with Apple, and anxious to get a mobile solution out there, but these kind of screw-ups just give more ammunition to Mr. Jobs.
Just because a browser crashes on a "certain" site does not mean it is Flash. The problem can also arise in bad programing in certain flash apps on certain sites. Ask Hulu, the way Hulu runs flash videos on their site is different than the way Google runs Flash videos on their site. Anyone who knows about testing betas, knows and expects betas to be full of glitches, problems, faults. That is the point of a beta to find, fix, the problems and tweak the product to run exceptional when the final product ships.
Flash has been crashing on Firefox for years. Adobe is yet to fix it. So much of a problem this is that Mozilla has made changes to future versions to isolate Flash from the browser. At least when it crashes, it doesn't kill Firefox completely.
When a Flash game doesn't crash Firefox -- or cause a total, catastrophic reset of my PC, (rare, but it's an amazing thing to witness), Flash is so slow on Flash heavy sites that I'm forced to use my only Firefox add-on, FlashBlock. I use FlashBlock not out of some misdirected ideology. I use it to keep my sanity.
Amazing how in an age where Gordon Brown is taught how to smile and walk, a company like Adobe can't make sure it's water tight at such a sensitive moment by checking all the URLs in private before the day.
They have a buggy beta and they should not have presented anything that they knew was not going to work. Also, they should have made it a point to show the beta when they could show at least one major site that uses flash. 1) always good to show your own website Adobe.com, then a youtube and hulu would not have hurt. They should have waited until it was that far along. But IMHO it is too soon to form any opinion of how this will turn out.
This shows nothing about flash on mobile devices. It only shows that Android is almost as bad as the iPhone. Eco Zoo works and doesn't crash on my N900. Maybe those guys should buy themselves decent phones.
I tried checking out Eco Zoo.
Under IE, Mozilla, Firefox, SeaMonkey and Opera.
In every single case, the page loaded, the Flash thingy started, the progress bar progressed, and nothing but a (rather nice) background.
Oh, one thing : Mozilla apparently locked on "transferring data".
Maybe I tried at an inappropriate time ?
If you're going to demonstrate something like this, you at least make sure that the one thing you are going to show is working!
Even if that means having a chat with the site owner and asking him to either not change anything for a few days, or to give you a backdoor URL to a flash page that is frozen and not going to change.
Adobe's Flash implementation for Android IS a crock o'sh*te?
The evidence certainly points to that, Apple spin notwithstanding.