IE6 is, unfortunately, still relevant. I work for [Major Real Estate Marketing Company Here], and we still have more than 15% of visits from IE6. That's a huge market segment to flat out ignore.
We've had "Hunt down and destroy all computers running IE6" in our tracker for some time, but it still hasn't been done. Instead we just yell profanities every time a feature fails in it.
jonxp on
Every time you write parallel fifths, Bach kills a kitten.
3DS Friend Code: 2707-1614-5576 PAX Prime 2014 Buttoneering!
So, I have to get this off my chest, and I apologize if it's already been said but....
Why the fuck is google building an OS specifically designed for web-based apps when everything we currently use to build web apps is a big fat kludge? I mean, seriously, HTML + JS was never intended to create full-blown user applications, HTML was initially designed to transfer and format information, and Javascript was just meant to automate a lot of that.
Now we have AJAX, jQuery, etc whose sole purpose in life is to shoe-horn common UI tasks into a platform that was never designed for it; a platform whose implementations (I'm fucking looking at you IE6) is anything but consistent unless an inordinate amount of time is spent cajoling the fucking thing into consistency.
So, why, DEAR GOD WHY, Is any company wasting time and money on this horseshit when the community really should be designing a new solution that is MEANT to do all this web-app bullshit from the ground up?
Seriously.
Maybe I'm just a cranky web developer... who knows. Something about this whole "the OS is the web" phenomenon really irks me in some way.
I have no problems with everybody using "the cloud" (fuck i hate saying that though) but can we please build the car right before we all start hitting the road?
Read up / watch presentations on HTML5 and so on. Also, IE6 is no longer relevant. Firefox has enough of a marketshare that Microsoft is pretty much compelled to be compatible whether they want to be or not.
- IE6 isn't relevant, but that doesn't stop the unwashed masses from using it because it simply came with their shitty old dell. Believe me, I get a LOT of "it doesn't work (in IE6)" even in this Utopia of Firefox and Chrome.
- HTML5 is the new thing. But you know what? Because everybody is still using fucking IE6-7 and Firefox 2 none of them care one bit. The average user doesn't give a shit about your Ajacks and your Jahva. They don't care about standards and HTML5. and you know who the bulk of your clients are as a web developer? Yeah, the average user. All these fancy pants standards do is leave me on the outside of the Secret Garden. On the outside looking in. I can't ever use any of these new features because they only fucking work in Safari 4 or Chrome, I can't tell the bulk of my clients to "just use Chrome."
- OR -
- HTML5, Sweet! new features! Now that I'm done making this great new web-app with all these shiny new toys all that's left is to make it degrade.... gracefully.... to IE6... huh? What's that Boss? I'm fired because I've spent twice the amount of time we quoted the client? But... but... we must uphold the Sacred Standards! My Life For HTML5!
...
Ok I'm being a bit dramatic here. Standards are great, and we really should adhere to them. But the sad, painful, suicidal thought inducing reality is that standards were an afterthought, and largely discarded when IE slaughtered Netscape, then we had to put them all back together to make all our sites work in something other than IE. Now the bulk of our time is spent compensating for MS' shitty software. But, it's cool, because their sites work in other browsers now.
I'm going off on a tangent here so.. bleh.
robotbebop on
Do not feel trapped by the need to achieve anything, this way you achieve everything.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
IE6 is, unfortunately, still relevant. I work for [Major Real Estate Marketing Company Here], and we still have more than 15% of visits from IE6. That's a huge market segment to flat out ignore.
We've had "Hunt down and destroy all computers running IE6" in our tracker for some time, but it still hasn't been done. Instead we just yell profanities every time a feature fails in it.
Sounds like standard operating procedure. I will say that I have been so maddened by IE6 that I actually laughed and cackled in sheer rage, almost as if I was at the threshold of discarding my soul and transforming into a merciless creature of anger and hatred.
robotbebop on
Do not feel trapped by the need to achieve anything, this way you achieve everything.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
The company I work for at the moment tells people to go take a hike if they want IE6 compatibility, or pay extra. Complete with charts on how Vista comes with IE7 minimum and now 7 with IE8, and how IE8 is being pushed down as a required update on XP anyway.
Although I have seen the horrors. A computer I had to fix was an unpatched XP Pro... not even service pack 1. IE6 couldn't even download IE8, I had to download Firefox and then download IE8 with Firefox.
HTML5 is the new thing. But you know what? Because everybody is still using fucking IE6-7 and Firefox 2 none of them care one bit.
Normally, I would laugh at such a suggestion. But I was at the mozillaZine forums the other day in a thread about possible future UI changes, and there was this guy arguing that IE8 is only slightly less absolutely fucking shit than IE7 (and IE6 was the best for accessibility) and going on about this and that and how Firefox is all bloated. I digress, though.
Turns out he's still using IE6 and Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP and doesn't use the toolbars - he uses items from the menu bar. He is that resistant to any kind of change.
So I'm going to agree with you wholeheartedly on that point.
HTML5 is the new thing. But you know what? Because everybody is still using fucking IE6-7 and Firefox 2 none of them care one bit.
Normally, I would laugh at such a suggestion. But I was at the mozillaZine forums the other day in a thread about possible future UI changes, and there was this guy arguing that IE8 is only slightly less absolutely fucking shit than IE7 (and IE6 was the best for accessibility) and going on about this and that and how Firefox is all bloated. I digress, though.
Turns out he's still using IE6 and Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP and doesn't use the toolbars - he uses items from the menu bar. He is that resistant to any kind of change.
So I'm going to agree with you wholeheartedly on that point.
That physically hurts to read. I am impressed.
robotbebop on
Do not feel trapped by the need to achieve anything, this way you achieve everything.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
The company I work for at the moment tells people to go take a hike if they want IE6 compatibility, or pay extra. Complete with charts on how Vista comes with IE7 minimum and now 7 with IE8, and how IE8 is being pushed down as a required update on XP anyway.
Although I have seen the horrors. A computer I had to fix was an unpatched XP Pro... not even service pack 1. IE6 couldn't even download IE8, I had to download Firefox and then download IE8 with Firefox.
How big is your company? How many employees do you have and how many clients do you have to deal with? Cause that seems like a really good way to lose customers.
Actually.. we're derailing this thread. Should I create a new one or is it not worth it ?
robotbebop on
Do not feel trapped by the need to achieve anything, this way you achieve everything.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
This isn't the 1980's, HTML is powerful. The web is powerful. Saying that it wasn't designed to do it is fine, it wasn't. But saying it isn't fully capable of performing the task is just wrong.
The web is just another level of abstraction on top of actual software written in languages like C, or what have you. The goal of this abstraction is to make building applications easier to do and for a larger group of people. The performance costs of the "shoe-horning" is completely negligible on even modestly aged hardware. Just today I was running javascript performance tests on a very intensive set of jQuery commands and even the most vicious and complex of the commands was running at only 5ms.
To your point about IE6, if you really believe IE6 will be relevant in 2011, then you are also signaling that you believe that most of the people with these 4-8 year old computers will not be upgrading their machines by that point. I firmly believe that the success of Windows 7, and the increasing marketshare of Linux/Google in the laptop/netbook market will kill of IE6 in the next two to three years. Anyone who is left at that point is probably not even caring that the web is completely fucked up for them.
Luckily that 2-3 years gives everyone, including MS, at least one full version number lifecycle for their browsers to implement a final draft of HTML5 when it comes.
The only thing that I would worry about as a web developer with regards to HTML5 and GoogleOS is the role of HTML5 in basically making plugins obsolete. As a professional Flash developer, it pains me to see companies like Google and Apple lobbying hard against Flash in favor of what I believe to be a technically inferior HTML5 video tag. But I also think that Adobe will get the message and work on opening up their platform to stay relevant.
tl;dr
1) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the web that makes it unsuitable for basing an OS/Application architecture off of it. The penalty received from adding yet another layer of abstraction is easily, and arguably already offset by improved hardware.
2) IE6 is not going to be around forever, in fact it might not even make it out of 2010 if Windows 7 becomes the critical success it appears that it may be. It will not take much to get to the point where major players like Apple/Google simply shut out IE6 users and require them to upgrade their browsers, especially if that means advancing the cause of HTML5 media functionality, which is giving Google wet dreams since they will then be untethered to Adobe.
This isn't the 1980's, HTML is powerful. The web is powerful. Saying that it wasn't designed to do it is fine, it wasn't. But saying it isn't fully capable of performing the task is just wrong.
The web is just another level of abstraction on top of actual software written in languages like C, or what have you. The goal of this abstraction is to make building applications easier to do and for a larger group of people. The performance costs of the "shoe-horning" is completely negligible on even modestly aged hardware. Just today I was running javascript performance tests on a very intensive set of jQuery commands and even the most vicious and complex of the commands was running at only 5ms.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of an Enterprise Firewall? An outdated or limited network with severe bandwidth issues? Or God help everyone an Intranet only network, I know from personal experience at a few different places that these are total hell.
To your point about IE6, if you really believe IE6 will be relevant in 2011, then you are also signaling that you believe that most of the people with these 4-8 year old computers will not be upgrading their machines by that point. I firmly believe that the success of Windows 7, and the increasing marketshare of Linux/Google in the laptop/netbook market will kill of IE6 in the next two to three years. Anyone who is left at that point is probably not even caring that the web is completely fucked up for them.
You don't seem to comprehend the situation at all. MS has been trying to kill IE6 for years since the release of IE7. Companies are still using IE6 because of proprietary software they need for their business. This software was written by narrow minded people, such as yourself, who could not grasp a bigger picture or plan ahead. These companies are not willing to spend the money to obtain new software.
As for netbooks, Linux hasn't made much head room. The return rates of Linux netbooks were actually pretty high. People want what they're familiar with or what their software runs on. Netbooks are for internet & typing. Well the best typing program the almost all businesses use is MS Office.
The only thing that I would worry about as a web developer with regards to HTML5 and GoogleOS is the role of HTML5 in basically making plugins obsolete. As a professional Flash developer, it pains me to see companies like Google and Apple lobbying hard against Flash in favor of what I believe to be a technically inferior HTML5 video tag. But I also think that Adobe will get the message and work on opening up their platform to stay relevant.
Now lets leave fantasy land in favor of the real world and the big three groups. The big three groups are Business users, Average users, and Hobbyist users.
Business users only use IE. It runs their software and more importantly has group policy controls. No other browser will have a real chance until they add a form of group policy controls. These people have held onto IE6 for years and see no reason to update. You're not supposed to casually browse the web at work. And if you want their money your company site should in IE6 just like theirs.
Average users don't care about coding or browsers. They want websites to just work and they have serious issue with updating their browser. If they use firefox it's for 2 reasons. 1) Someone installed it for them and told them to use it instead of IE or made it look like IE. I personally have had to clean a lot of PCs because someone thought they couldn't get a virus while using Firefox. 2) Someone installed it for them and showed them add-ons. And now they don't want to upgrade because they'll loose their add-ons. They don't care about web standards or coding.
Hobbyist users keep up to date. These are the guys that browser with Opera, Chrome, and Firefox. They have varying ideals and really tend to throw a wrench into a lot of things. Some openly talk of installing their browser and switching the icon with IE's. They're just throwing wrenches by creating more work for others. While others use Firefox just because they think it makes them cool or one of the smart tech guys.
Flash video can really put a hurt on older PCs do to a total lack of hardware acceleration. Flash uses H.264 yet has no way to run the video off dedicated chips or video cards. It uses the CPU only and God help you if the video is in HD The fact that flash has issues with Apple and is non-existent for Linux shows that Adobe only cares for the majority of people. Don't even bring up the iPhone. Jobs has blocked both Flash & Sliverlight from that platform even though both MS & Adobe have micro/moble versions.
1) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the web that makes it unsuitable for basing an OS/Application architecture off of it. The penalty received from adding yet another layer of abstraction is easily, and arguably already offset by improved hardware.
People don't update as much as you think. They paid $1,000.00+ for that PC years ago and they should be able to use it as long as they want. After all they only email & surf the web. Case in point the issues some people had with Vista because their PC was 5+ years old with on board video & 512mb of memory at most. And when people do buy new they still keep the old junkers for their kids to surf the web or email on.
2) IE6 is not going to be around forever, in fact it might not even make it out of 2010 if Windows 7 becomes the critical success it appears that it may be. It will not take much to get to the point where major players like Apple/Google simply shut out IE6 users and require them to upgrade their browsers, especially if that means advancing the cause of HTML5 media functionality, which is giving Google wet dreams since they will then be untethered to Adobe.
How many people do you think will run IE6 in XP Mode on Win7? Google is trying to get businesses to use their Gmail & Google docs. Do you think telling businesses to upgrade their browser or they can't view the site would earn Google sales/business?
Flash video can really put a hurt on older PCs do to a total lack of hardware acceleration. Flash uses H.264 yet has no way to run the video off dedicated chips or video cards. It uses the CPU only and God help you if the video is in HD The fact that flash has issues with Apple and is non-existent for Linux shows that Adobe only cares for the majority of people. Don't even bring up the iPhone. Jobs has blocked both Flash & Sliverlight from that platform even though both MS & Adobe have micro/moble versions.
I like the first comment: "There may have been some substance in there somewhere but it was lost amongst the swearing and name calling." Dude doesn't know what 'drafting' means, which is a pity, because it was so close to being a decent piece.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say but I'll assume it's a good natured compliment.
Sure. :P
Also, I loved this gem from that article:
A netbook is really just an iPhone that's too big to go in your pocket, but Google fondly imagines it can form the thin end of the wedge to knock Microsoft off its perch, with ChromeOS eventually worming its way onto desktops and servers. Dream on.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say but I'll assume it's a good natured compliment.
Sure. :P
Also, I loved this gem from that article:
A netbook is really just an iPhone that's too big to go in your pocket, but Google fondly imagines it can form the thin end of the wedge to knock Microsoft off its perch, with ChromeOS eventually worming its way onto desktops and servers. Dream on.
Dark Shroud your entire argument is based on the idea that somehow business computers are the primary or even secondary market for web content. Nothing could be further from the truth. For your information I am on the receiving end of a corporate network with all the limitations and restrictions that come with it, and guess what, I don't care!
You somehow manage to convince yourself that if the entire market uniformly moved to an entirely new set of standards that somehow businesses would stubbornly stay on IE6 because they haven't yet discovered one of the billion alternatives to IE6 content control policies, and that, even on Windows 7, corporations will run under XP mode just for the sake of using IE6.
And yet, even if that is true, it is entirely inconsequential to this new paradigm in application delivery, since the target market has nothing to do with the ignorant corporate minds behind sustaining legacy software.
The point is this, if the entire internet switches to HTML 5, but bob at Widget Inc wants to use IE6 still during business hours, who the fuck gives a shit?
Nobody, he's only doing a disservice to himself, and if he wants to access content, he has to upgrade.
Flash and video is an entirely different subject and yet you somehow also manage to pretend that market forces would somehow not manage to persuade Adobe to step up their game. Have you simply not taken an economics class in the last decade?
Flash works perfectly fine in both OSX and Linux. I'm not sure where you got your info.
It's probably more accurate to say that it works as well as it does in Windows; "perfectly fine" is a bit of a stretch. :P
"Unstable and otherwise crash-prone" is how I would describe the Linux port. I open a different browser window when using Youtube because it's inevitable (yes, that is accurate) that Flash will crash at some point. It's gotten a lot better since Flash 8 but still has a long way to go.
There's some talk that Googles replacement windowing system might be based on directfb since apparently Google has been contributing some code to it for some reason..
Android is, AFAIK, using the Linux framebuffer directly and I've seen some mention of attempting to port DirectFB to Android. It's possible that Google has some of their developers contributing to that (maybe during their weekly free time), at least where the API needs to be compatible with the existing framebuffer implementation so it could be used as a drop-in replacement.
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Flash works perfectly fine in both OSX and Linux. I'm not sure where you got your info.
It's probably more accurate to say that it works as well as it does in Windows; "perfectly fine" is a bit of a stretch. :P
"Unstable and otherwise crash-prone" is how I would describe the Linux port. I open a different browser window when using Youtube because it's inevitable (yes, that is accurate) that Flash will crash at some point. It's gotten a lot better since Flash 8 but still has a long way to go.
Yeah, pretty much. It also uses a lot more of the processor and runs flash games a lot slower than in Windows. As for stability, I'm not entirely sure if Flash had gotten more stable or if Firefox has gotten better at keeping unstable plugins under control; Flash crashes a ton more in the non-Mozilla browsers I've tried it in.
The high processor usage is also an issue on OS X. I've heard that the mobile version of flash is not a complete implementation, and if it's even a fraction of the "quality" of the Linux or OS X one, I can see why Jobs would balk at putting it on the iPhone.
Works fine for me in every browser except Opera, linux-wise.
Granted, I don't watch anything more hi-def than HQ Youtube and stuff from Gametrailers. Maybe it would choke on heavier stuff.
I think a lot of Flash's problem in linux is actually linux not coming pre-installed with 32 bit libraries (or at least, the right ones) on the 64 bit distros. That's what made it a pain for me, anyway.
Currently, Flash works no differently for me in linux than in windows. Browsers, on the other hand...
Works fine for me in every browser except Opera, linux-wise.
Flash works for me in Opera, with the advantage that when Flash crashes it doesn't take down the browser (or hasn't yet since I tried the Opera 10 beta). If Flash crashes the operapluginwrapper subprocess gets unhappy, but refreshing the page brings it back to life.
Granted, I don't watch anything more hi-def than HQ Youtube and stuff from Gametrailers. Maybe it would choke on heavier stuff.
On HD flash videos it uses a lot of CPU. [vidurl=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5eupXPNryE]Watch this[/vidurl] in HD and pay attention to the CPU usage, because it spikes up to 93% on my machine. Until I overclocked my CPU just a little bit it would sometimes max out and start stuttering.
I think a lot of Flash's problem in linux is actually linux not coming pre-installed with 32 bit libraries (or at least, the right ones) on the 64 bit distros. That's what made it a pain for me, anyway.
I currently still run 32-bit Linux simply because of Flash. I don't use anything more memory intensive than Firefox (lawl), so I deal with not being able to use all four gigs of RAM.
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Definitely shittier in Linux than on Windows. But maybe we'll see some real development of Linux-related things with this OS (that's my major hope, at least.)
Yeah, Flash sucks a lot for HD. They need to work on some GPU integration or something. But even just looking at CPU usage, it's way worse to play 1080p video (for example) with flash than it is to play it with a CPU-only media player.
Flash works for me in Opera, with the advantage that when Flash crashes it doesn't take down the browser (or hasn't yet since I tried the Opera 10 beta).
Yeah, to Opera's credit, it was the only browser I used to be able to use thanks to flash crashing everything else. Still works in Opera with my current distro, but it's just kinda... stuttery.
Flash isn't bad. But it's still young. A lot of the performance problems are related to video which Adobe is falling over itself to get fixed, and the groundwork is already laid to get hardware rendering for video going. It also has some architecture problems that are particularly highlighted by this forum where you can get 30 youtube instances loaded up on one page. That will also get fixed.
Flash isn't going away, because the reality is that if you want to do custom motion graphics on the web, doing it in javascript is basically performance suicide.
Flash isn't going away, because the reality is that if you want to do custom motion graphics on the web, doing it in javascript is basically performance suicide.
Hopefully, though, it'll get used a lot less now that HTML has a <video> tag.
And as for the Tom's article: I always find it funny when hardware review sites, who get ridiculously high-end expensive laptops for free as review samples, disparage netbooks as a worthless fad. I guess it's a point of view thing.
Flash isn't bad. But it's still young. A lot of the performance problems are related to video which Adobe is falling over itself to get fixed, and the groundwork is already laid to get hardware rendering for video going. It also has some architecture problems that are particularly highlighted by this forum where you can get 30 youtube instances loaded up on one page. That will also get fixed.
Young? YouTube was around (and popular) in 2005, and Flash ate cpu then, too. There was every indication that the next step was heftier video, and Adobe didn't really do much of anything about it. They've had plenty of time to get this sorted out.
Flash isn't going away, because the reality is that if you want to do custom motion graphics on the web, doing it in javascript is basically performance suicide.
Hopefully, though, it'll get used a lot less now that HTML has a <video> tag.
And as for the Tom's article: I always find it funny when hardware review sites, who get ridiculously high-end expensive laptops for free as review samples, disparage netbooks as a worthless fad. I guess it's a point of view thing.
It might, but there are still simply things you cannot do in javascript that you can do in Flash, 3D is the first thing that comes to mind, something that Flash already uses hardware acceleration for. We are in the very first stages of the infancy of 3D on the web that doesn't suck, and Flash will dominate that market.
Flash isn't bad. But it's still young. A lot of the performance problems are related to video which Adobe is falling over itself to get fixed, and the groundwork is already laid to get hardware rendering for video going. It also has some architecture problems that are particularly highlighted by this forum where you can get 30 youtube instances loaded up on one page. That will also get fixed.
Young? YouTube was around (and popular) in 2005, and Flash ate cpu then, too. There was every indication that the next step was heftier video, and Adobe didn't really do much of anything about it. They've had plenty of time to get this sorted out.
That's not that old, and Adobe has been extremely busy advancing their software platform in numerous ways I am sure you are completely unaware of.
Alternatively, under normal usage, the CPU consumption of Flash is not exactly destructive. Youtube did not design their player to be running 30 instances at the same time. They just didn't. Adobe's hope was likely that hardware advances would offset the CPU issue while they worked on more important things. Same mistake Microsoft made with Vista. Fine. But now that netbooks and non-Windows OS's are on the march, if you think that Flash won't see a dramatic improvement in those sectors, you are out of your damn mind.
Flash isn't bad. But it's still young. A lot of the performance problems are related to video which Adobe is falling over itself to get fixed, and the groundwork is already laid to get hardware rendering for video going. It also has some architecture problems that are particularly highlighted by this forum where you can get 30 youtube instances loaded up on one page. That will also get fixed.
Young? YouTube was around (and popular) in 2005, and Flash ate cpu then, too. There was every indication that the next step was heftier video, and Adobe didn't really do much of anything about it. They've had plenty of time to get this sorted out.
That's not that old, and Adobe has been extremely busy advancing their software platform in numerous ways I am sure you are completely unaware of.
Alternatively, under normal usage, the CPU consumption of Flash is not exactly destructive. Youtube did not design their player to be running 30 instances at the same time. They just didn't. Adobe's hope was likely that hardware advances would offset the CPU issue while they worked on more important things. Same mistake Microsoft made with Vista. Fine. But now that netbooks and non-Windows OS's are on the march, if you think that Flash won't see a dramatic improvement in those sectors, you are out of your damn mind.
I'm not saying I don't think Flash won't make drastic improvement. ANY improvement on non-Windows platforms is drastic at this point. I just think the noticeable improvements we've been getting since 2005 have been rather sad. I mean, four years is significant time in software, and the noticeable improvements we've gotten in Linux since then have been "Versions of Flash higher than 7!", "Not crashing on every other video", and "Oh, look. It's not constantly using 100% CPU all the time anymore."
But yes. We'll hopefully get more improvements as they keep going (and maybe finish the 64bit version).
I've been waiting for a flash improvement for OS X for years, and my main computer is a goddamn MacBook Pro (albeit, 2nd gen). It sucks an incredible amount of CPU and sometimes is still slow. (I cannot even play youtube HD on this computer.) On the same hardware under windows the experience is silky smooth. On Linux it's like OS X, but even slower and less stable.
In closing: Adobe are a bunch of cockbites more interested in the bottom line than quality of their product. Their supposed willingness to support all platforms are generally breadcrumbs tossed in the direction of operating systems that aren't Windows.
The fact that they're one of the biggest software companies in the world, and have one of the most used applications in the world (Flash) that as of now only has an alpha of a 64-bit version is telling. Thanks to this kind of corporate attitude, it is difficult for anyone to break the Microsoft stranglehold on the PC operating system market. This applies to Google Chrome OS as much as it does any version of Linux, and even MacOSX to some extent.
In closing: Adobe are a bunch of cockbites more interested in the bottom line than quality of their product. Their supposed willingness to support all platforms are generally breadcrumbs tossed in the direction of operating systems that aren't Windows.
The fact that they're one of the biggest software companies in the world, and have one of the most used applications in the world (Flash) that as of now only has an alpha of a 64-bit version is telling. Thanks to this kind of corporate attitude, it is difficult for anyone to break the Microsoft stranglehold on the PC operating system market. This applies to Google Chrome OS as much as it does any version of Linux, and even MacOSX to some extent.
With some of the fancy stuff in HTML5 i'm hoping that Flash and Silverlight are sidestepped completely. Some of the HTML5 demos are seriously impressive and give the plugins a run for their money. Plus, because it's in the browser and not a plugin you can do stuff that you simply can't do with a plugin. (like embedding video in a rotatable/movable div for example)
I hope Mozillas push of the video tag makes headway, I also hope they add support to dirac instead of just theora. (at least when lower bitrate dirac matures)
GrimReaper on
PSN | Steam
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
I've been waiting for a flash improvement for OS X for years, and my main computer is a goddamn MacBook Pro (albeit, 2nd gen). It sucks an incredible amount of CPU and sometimes is still slow. (I cannot even play youtube HD on this computer.) On the same hardware under windows the experience is silky smooth. On Linux it's like OS X, but even slower and less stable.
I have exactly 0 problems playing HD flash video on my 13 inch macbook. Only thing that happens with Flash is that my fans turn on and the computer gets hotter than anything else makes it do--but at least it runs totally smooth.
Plus, because it's in the browser and not a plugin you can do stuff that you simply can't do with a plugin. (like embedding video in a rotatable/movable div for example)
You have got to be joking right? That sort of thing is absurdly easy to do in Flash.
I've been waiting for a flash improvement for OS X for years, and my main computer is a goddamn MacBook Pro (albeit, 2nd gen). It sucks an incredible amount of CPU and sometimes is still slow. (I cannot even play youtube HD on this computer.) On the same hardware under windows the experience is silky smooth. On Linux it's like OS X, but even slower and less stable.
I have exactly 0 problems playing HD flash video on my 13 inch macbook. Only thing that happens with Flash is that my fans turn on and the computer gets hotter than anything else makes it do--but at least it runs totally smooth.
For the most part any embedded Flash runs pretty well on my Macbook unibody (2.4GHz), but if I run anything in the background, even other tabs, my CPU utilization goes through the roof and I'll get what looks like 80~90% of normal framerate occasionally. What's really annoying is that I can run the same Flash on Windows in VMWare and I'll get much less CPU utilization under virtualization than playing the video natively through OSX!
Adobe has acknowledged this is a problem, but even their own representative said that they can't fix it at the moment because they're focusing on getting Flash to work on mobile devices.
I've been waiting for a flash improvement for OS X for years, and my main computer is a goddamn MacBook Pro (albeit, 2nd gen). It sucks an incredible amount of CPU and sometimes is still slow. (I cannot even play youtube HD on this computer.) On the same hardware under windows the experience is silky smooth. On Linux it's like OS X, but even slower and less stable.
I have exactly 0 problems playing HD flash video on my 13 inch macbook. Only thing that happens with Flash is that my fans turn on and the computer gets hotter than anything else makes it do--but at least it runs totally smooth.
2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo seems to be just about on the threshold of what is needed to play youtube HD on a Mac, based on google searches.
It need not be mentioned that more than one of those same videos, when not in Flash, can be played smoothly at the same time on this computer.
And? I really think Google and Mozilla are completely sidestepping MS and Adobe. Whilst MS and Adobe are obsessed about locking people into Flash and Silverlight/.net, Google and Mozilla are seeing that the future is HTML5, JS, canvas etc.
For example, a few years ago the only way to do stuff like this would have required flash but now it's all done in the browser. With it all being in the browser rather than a plugin you can do things with the content that you can never do with a plugin.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
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We've had "Hunt down and destroy all computers running IE6" in our tracker for some time, but it still hasn't been done. Instead we just yell profanities every time a feature fails in it.
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- IE6 isn't relevant, but that doesn't stop the unwashed masses from using it because it simply came with their shitty old dell. Believe me, I get a LOT of "it doesn't work (in IE6)" even in this Utopia of Firefox and Chrome.
- HTML5 is the new thing. But you know what? Because everybody is still using fucking IE6-7 and Firefox 2 none of them care one bit. The average user doesn't give a shit about your Ajacks and your Jahva. They don't care about standards and HTML5. and you know who the bulk of your clients are as a web developer? Yeah, the average user. All these fancy pants standards do is leave me on the outside of the Secret Garden. On the outside looking in. I can't ever use any of these new features because they only fucking work in Safari 4 or Chrome, I can't tell the bulk of my clients to "just use Chrome."
- OR -
- HTML5, Sweet! new features! Now that I'm done making this great new web-app with all these shiny new toys all that's left is to make it degrade.... gracefully.... to IE6... huh? What's that Boss? I'm fired because I've spent twice the amount of time we quoted the client? But... but... we must uphold the Sacred Standards! My Life For HTML5!
...
Ok I'm being a bit dramatic here. Standards are great, and we really should adhere to them. But the sad, painful, suicidal thought inducing reality is that standards were an afterthought, and largely discarded when IE slaughtered Netscape, then we had to put them all back together to make all our sites work in something other than IE. Now the bulk of our time is spent compensating for MS' shitty software. But, it's cool, because their sites work in other browsers now.
I'm going off on a tangent here so.. bleh.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
Sounds like standard operating procedure. I will say that I have been so maddened by IE6 that I actually laughed and cackled in sheer rage, almost as if I was at the threshold of discarding my soul and transforming into a merciless creature of anger and hatred.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
Although I have seen the horrors. A computer I had to fix was an unpatched XP Pro... not even service pack 1. IE6 couldn't even download IE8, I had to download Firefox and then download IE8 with Firefox.
Turns out he's still using IE6 and Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP and doesn't use the toolbars - he uses items from the menu bar. He is that resistant to any kind of change.
So I'm going to agree with you wholeheartedly on that point.
That physically hurts to read. I am impressed.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
How big is your company? How many employees do you have and how many clients do you have to deal with? Cause that seems like a really good way to lose customers.
Actually.. we're derailing this thread. Should I create a new one or is it not worth it ?
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
This isn't the 1980's, HTML is powerful. The web is powerful. Saying that it wasn't designed to do it is fine, it wasn't. But saying it isn't fully capable of performing the task is just wrong.
The web is just another level of abstraction on top of actual software written in languages like C, or what have you. The goal of this abstraction is to make building applications easier to do and for a larger group of people. The performance costs of the "shoe-horning" is completely negligible on even modestly aged hardware. Just today I was running javascript performance tests on a very intensive set of jQuery commands and even the most vicious and complex of the commands was running at only 5ms.
To your point about IE6, if you really believe IE6 will be relevant in 2011, then you are also signaling that you believe that most of the people with these 4-8 year old computers will not be upgrading their machines by that point. I firmly believe that the success of Windows 7, and the increasing marketshare of Linux/Google in the laptop/netbook market will kill of IE6 in the next two to three years. Anyone who is left at that point is probably not even caring that the web is completely fucked up for them.
Luckily that 2-3 years gives everyone, including MS, at least one full version number lifecycle for their browsers to implement a final draft of HTML5 when it comes.
The only thing that I would worry about as a web developer with regards to HTML5 and GoogleOS is the role of HTML5 in basically making plugins obsolete. As a professional Flash developer, it pains me to see companies like Google and Apple lobbying hard against Flash in favor of what I believe to be a technically inferior HTML5 video tag. But I also think that Adobe will get the message and work on opening up their platform to stay relevant.
tl;dr
1) There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the web that makes it unsuitable for basing an OS/Application architecture off of it. The penalty received from adding yet another layer of abstraction is easily, and arguably already offset by improved hardware.
2) IE6 is not going to be around forever, in fact it might not even make it out of 2010 if Windows 7 becomes the critical success it appears that it may be. It will not take much to get to the point where major players like Apple/Google simply shut out IE6 users and require them to upgrade their browsers, especially if that means advancing the cause of HTML5 media functionality, which is giving Google wet dreams since they will then be untethered to Adobe.
You don't seem to comprehend the situation at all. MS has been trying to kill IE6 for years since the release of IE7. Companies are still using IE6 because of proprietary software they need for their business. This software was written by narrow minded people, such as yourself, who could not grasp a bigger picture or plan ahead. These companies are not willing to spend the money to obtain new software.
As for netbooks, Linux hasn't made much head room. The return rates of Linux netbooks were actually pretty high. People want what they're familiar with or what their software runs on. Netbooks are for internet & typing. Well the best typing program the almost all businesses use is MS Office.
Now lets leave fantasy land in favor of the real world and the big three groups. The big three groups are Business users, Average users, and Hobbyist users.
Flash video can really put a hurt on older PCs do to a total lack of hardware acceleration. Flash uses H.264 yet has no way to run the video off dedicated chips or video cards. It uses the CPU only and God help you if the video is in HD The fact that flash has issues with Apple and is non-existent for Linux shows that Adobe only cares for the majority of people. Don't even bring up the iPhone. Jobs has blocked both Flash & Sliverlight from that platform even though both MS & Adobe have micro/moble versions.
People don't update as much as you think. They paid $1,000.00+ for that PC years ago and they should be able to use it as long as they want. After all they only email & surf the web. Case in point the issues some people had with Vista because their PC was 5+ years old with on board video & 512mb of memory at most. And when people do buy new they still keep the old junkers for their kids to surf the web or email on.
How many people do you think will run IE6 in XP Mode on Win7? Google is trying to get businesses to use their Gmail & Google docs. Do you think telling businesses to upgrade their browser or they can't view the site would earn Google sales/business?
:rotate:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/43156/141/
I'm not sure what you're trying to say but I'll assume it's a good natured compliment.
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PAX Prime 2014 Buttoneering!
Sure. :P
Also, I loved this gem from that article:
Really?
Sure. :P
Also, I loved this gem from that article:
Really?
?
See? Purdy. This is on the Dev-branch update channel. Probably should have mentioned that the first time.
You somehow manage to convince yourself that if the entire market uniformly moved to an entirely new set of standards that somehow businesses would stubbornly stay on IE6 because they haven't yet discovered one of the billion alternatives to IE6 content control policies, and that, even on Windows 7, corporations will run under XP mode just for the sake of using IE6.
And yet, even if that is true, it is entirely inconsequential to this new paradigm in application delivery, since the target market has nothing to do with the ignorant corporate minds behind sustaining legacy software.
The point is this, if the entire internet switches to HTML 5, but bob at Widget Inc wants to use IE6 still during business hours, who the fuck gives a shit?
Nobody, he's only doing a disservice to himself, and if he wants to access content, he has to upgrade.
Flash and video is an entirely different subject and yet you somehow also manage to pretend that market forces would somehow not manage to persuade Adobe to step up their game. Have you simply not taken an economics class in the last decade?
"Unstable and otherwise crash-prone" is how I would describe the Linux port. I open a different browser window when using Youtube because it's inevitable (yes, that is accurate) that Flash will crash at some point. It's gotten a lot better since Flash 8 but still has a long way to go.
Android is, AFAIK, using the Linux framebuffer directly and I've seen some mention of attempting to port DirectFB to Android. It's possible that Google has some of their developers contributing to that (maybe during their weekly free time), at least where the API needs to be compatible with the existing framebuffer implementation so it could be used as a drop-in replacement.
Purdy indeed. :winky:
The high processor usage is also an issue on OS X. I've heard that the mobile version of flash is not a complete implementation, and if it's even a fraction of the "quality" of the Linux or OS X one, I can see why Jobs would balk at putting it on the iPhone.
Granted, I don't watch anything more hi-def than HQ Youtube and stuff from Gametrailers. Maybe it would choke on heavier stuff.
I think a lot of Flash's problem in linux is actually linux not coming pre-installed with 32 bit libraries (or at least, the right ones) on the 64 bit distros. That's what made it a pain for me, anyway.
Currently, Flash works no differently for me in linux than in windows. Browsers, on the other hand...
Flash works for me in Opera, with the advantage that when Flash crashes it doesn't take down the browser (or hasn't yet since I tried the Opera 10 beta). If Flash crashes the operapluginwrapper subprocess gets unhappy, but refreshing the page brings it back to life.
On HD flash videos it uses a lot of CPU. [vidurl=
I currently still run 32-bit Linux simply because of Flash. I don't use anything more memory intensive than Firefox (lawl), so I deal with not being able to use all four gigs of RAM.
Yeah, Flash sucks a lot for HD. They need to work on some GPU integration or something. But even just looking at CPU usage, it's way worse to play 1080p video (for example) with flash than it is to play it with a CPU-only media player.
Yeah, to Opera's credit, it was the only browser I used to be able to use thanks to flash crashing everything else. Still works in Opera with my current distro, but it's just kinda... stuttery.
Flash isn't going away, because the reality is that if you want to do custom motion graphics on the web, doing it in javascript is basically performance suicide.
Hopefully, though, it'll get used a lot less now that HTML has a <video> tag.
And as for the Tom's article: I always find it funny when hardware review sites, who get ridiculously high-end expensive laptops for free as review samples, disparage netbooks as a worthless fad. I guess it's a point of view thing.
Young? YouTube was around (and popular) in 2005, and Flash ate cpu then, too. There was every indication that the next step was heftier video, and Adobe didn't really do much of anything about it. They've had plenty of time to get this sorted out.
It might, but there are still simply things you cannot do in javascript that you can do in Flash, 3D is the first thing that comes to mind, something that Flash already uses hardware acceleration for. We are in the very first stages of the infancy of 3D on the web that doesn't suck, and Flash will dominate that market.
That's not that old, and Adobe has been extremely busy advancing their software platform in numerous ways I am sure you are completely unaware of.
Alternatively, under normal usage, the CPU consumption of Flash is not exactly destructive. Youtube did not design their player to be running 30 instances at the same time. They just didn't. Adobe's hope was likely that hardware advances would offset the CPU issue while they worked on more important things. Same mistake Microsoft made with Vista. Fine. But now that netbooks and non-Windows OS's are on the march, if you think that Flash won't see a dramatic improvement in those sectors, you are out of your damn mind.
I'm not saying I don't think Flash won't make drastic improvement. ANY improvement on non-Windows platforms is drastic at this point. I just think the noticeable improvements we've been getting since 2005 have been rather sad. I mean, four years is significant time in software, and the noticeable improvements we've gotten in Linux since then have been "Versions of Flash higher than 7!", "Not crashing on every other video", and "Oh, look. It's not constantly using 100% CPU all the time anymore."
But yes. We'll hopefully get more improvements as they keep going (and maybe finish the 64bit version).
The fact that they're one of the biggest software companies in the world, and have one of the most used applications in the world (Flash) that as of now only has an alpha of a 64-bit version is telling. Thanks to this kind of corporate attitude, it is difficult for anyone to break the Microsoft stranglehold on the PC operating system market. This applies to Google Chrome OS as much as it does any version of Linux, and even MacOSX to some extent.
With some of the fancy stuff in HTML5 i'm hoping that Flash and Silverlight are sidestepped completely. Some of the HTML5 demos are seriously impressive and give the plugins a run for their money. Plus, because it's in the browser and not a plugin you can do stuff that you simply can't do with a plugin. (like embedding video in a rotatable/movable div for example)
I hope Mozillas push of the video tag makes headway, I also hope they add support to dirac instead of just theora. (at least when lower bitrate dirac matures)
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
I have exactly 0 problems playing HD flash video on my 13 inch macbook. Only thing that happens with Flash is that my fans turn on and the computer gets hotter than anything else makes it do--but at least it runs totally smooth.
PSN: SAW776
You have got to be joking right? That sort of thing is absurdly easy to do in Flash.
For the most part any embedded Flash runs pretty well on my Macbook unibody (2.4GHz), but if I run anything in the background, even other tabs, my CPU utilization goes through the roof and I'll get what looks like 80~90% of normal framerate occasionally. What's really annoying is that I can run the same Flash on Windows in VMWare and I'll get much less CPU utilization under virtualization than playing the video natively through OSX!
Adobe has acknowledged this is a problem, but even their own representative said that they can't fix it at the moment because they're focusing on getting Flash to work on mobile devices.
2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo seems to be just about on the threshold of what is needed to play youtube HD on a Mac, based on google searches.
It need not be mentioned that more than one of those same videos, when not in Flash, can be played smoothly at the same time on this computer.
Microsoft's Silverlight 8-)
And? I really think Google and Mozilla are completely sidestepping MS and Adobe. Whilst MS and Adobe are obsessed about locking people into Flash and Silverlight/.net, Google and Mozilla are seeing that the future is HTML5, JS, canvas etc.
For example, a few years ago the only way to do stuff like this would have required flash but now it's all done in the browser. With it all being in the browser rather than a plugin you can do things with the content that you can never do with a plugin.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.