Dearest Adobe Forums Community,
I have started this thread to confront results with opinions about Adobe's most well-known (and resource-wasting) product, the Flash Player. I will focus on video playing, because with this specific thing Flash Player can be compared to its alternatives. Adobe Flash player's video-playing feature is run on millions of computers every day wasting megawatts (even a few gigawatts) of electric energy globally, because of high CPU usage (thanks to inefficient code written by "lazy" Adobe developers). The most famous and used video-sharing site is YouTube, so I used it in my comparison.
I played it using the common method, opened it with Firefox and let the Flash Player do its job. Then I played it and when it was finished I navigated in Firefox's cache directory and copied the clip out, gave it .flv extension making it playable by other applications. These other applications were MPlayer GIT-7bc18b7-4.3.3-Kovensky-mt 20091009, Media Player Classic 6.4.8.9. Flash Player had version 10.1.51.95.
Here are the resulting CPU usages.
Sample used: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94t0L3Z6blo
Sizes / Software used
| MPlayer | MPC | Flash Player (Firefox 3.6)
|
|---|
| Original size | 11-19% | 11-24% | 58-62% |
| Full screen | 11-19% | 11-24% | 89-96% |
So why do we need thrice as much resource to play a video?
This was tested on a computer like this:
- Pentium 4 2.00 GHz processor
- 1G Memory of RAM
- NVidia GeForce 7300
- Windows XP SP3
Was Steve Jobs right or wrong about blaming Adobe developers for the bloatiness of Flash Player? Decide yourself.
I know, many people will be eager to prove me wrong, but before you try to do this, please test it for yourself, include your HW specs, and consider your hardware being different from mine. A few possible reasons to this difference:
- Adobe developers write inefficient code, because they are lazy as Steve Jobs said, don't like optimizing in Assembly or native C code. This is also an issue at other apps like Photoshop: sluggish, laggy interface, slow effect-processing, only a few things supported by GPU. If this is the case, I find it very disgusting, because even Flash Player is free, other apps are the most expensive in the market, so I think they have the financial resources to optimize the code.
- Although it can be turned on in the Settings menu, Flash Player can't take advantage of hardware video acceleration, that's why there is a huge difference in CPU usage between full-screen and original size.
- Adobe uses cross-platform compilers that generate bloaty binary codes.
This thread was not created to prove that Adobe Flash Player is useless, rather an inspiration to the developers to pay more attention on code-efficiency.
Cheers,
str4ngS
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