Following Apple’s announcement of the iPad on January 27th, an online battle erupted between those who sing the virtues of Flash and those who prefer HTML5. An opponent might say ”The iPad has no Flash? So much for the best web viewing experience.”, while a popular retort will read “Flash is dead. Time for the web to move into the future and support open standards.”
Yours truly is always in favor of open web standards in lieu of proprietary plugins, especially when that plugin is Flash. A resource-hog, unstable, and buggy, Flash has been woefully neglected on the Mac platform. It was so bad that when Apple was designing their Safari 4 web browser, they specifically sand-boxed each tab so that when (not if) Flash crashed, it would not take out the entire program. Throw in the fact that Adobe has yet to release a mobile version of Flash that doesn’t either crash the browser or drain the battery, it is no wonder that Apple did not embrace the technology on a mobile platform with limited resources.
After the break, I show an unscientific look at how Flash performs on Mac OS X in comparison to HTML5.
Web Playback Test
Th first test I conducted was simply exploring the performance of what a normal user would experience while watching a video on the web. In this case, I found a video on Vimeo.com, played it using their Flash player and then with their HTML5 player. During playback, I recorded the CPU usage as reported by Activity Monitor. The results are shown below. You can see the Flash version demands 51.9%, while the HTML5 version only demands 17.7%. [Note: Test conducted on a Unibody MacBook with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB RAM.]
CPU usage while watching video in Flash player
CPU usage while watching video in HTML5 player
Local File Test
I took a representative video file from Youtube, created a Flash-encoded version and an H.264-encoded version. I then ran both in Safari and recorded the CPU usage provided by Activity Monitor. As you can see, the video using the HTML5 video tag used substantially less resources than the Flash video. [Note: Test conducted on an early 2009 Mac Pro with 2x2.93GHz quad-core Xeon processors and 16GB of RAM.]
CPU usage while playing a Flash encoded video file in Safari
CPU usage while playing a video in Safari using the HTML5 video tag
Now, while I support Apple’s push for web standards, it is clear that Flash isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In my opinion, I feel Apple should at least give users the ability to enable/disable the Flash plugin via system settings in their mobile devices. In the meantime, it appears that several websites are already releasing iPad optimized websites, including CNN, ESPN, Vimeo, and several others. Apple has published a comprehensive list of iPad optimized websites.
An Un-Scientific Comparison of Flash vs. HTML5
Following Apple’s announcement of the iPad on January 27th, an online battle erupted between those who sing the virtues of Flash and those who prefer HTML5. An opponent might say ”The iPad has no Flash? So much for the best web viewing experience.”, while a popular retort will read “Flash is dead. Time for the web to move into the future and support open standards.”
Yours truly is always in favor of open web standards in lieu of proprietary plugins, especially when that plugin is Flash. A resource-hog, unstable, and buggy, Flash has been woefully neglected on the Mac platform. It was so bad that when Apple was designing their Safari 4 web browser, they specifically sand-boxed each tab so that when (not if) Flash crashed, it would not take out the entire program. Throw in the fact that Adobe has yet to release a mobile version of Flash that doesn’t either crash the browser or drain the battery, it is no wonder that Apple did not embrace the technology on a mobile platform with limited resources.
After the break, I show an unscientific look at how Flash performs on Mac OS X in comparison to HTML5.
Web Playback Test
Th first test I conducted was simply exploring the performance of what a normal user would experience while watching a video on the web. In this case, I found a video on Vimeo.com, played it using their Flash player and then with their HTML5 player. During playback, I recorded the CPU usage as reported by Activity Monitor. The results are shown below. You can see the Flash version demands 51.9%, while the HTML5 version only demands 17.7%. [Note: Test conducted on a Unibody MacBook with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB RAM.]
CPU usage while watching video in Flash player
CPU usage while watching video in HTML5 player
Local File Test
I took a representative video file from Youtube, created a Flash-encoded version and an H.264-encoded version. I then ran both in Safari and recorded the CPU usage provided by Activity Monitor. As you can see, the video using the HTML5 video tag used substantially less resources than the Flash video. [Note: Test conducted on an early 2009 Mac Pro with 2x2.93GHz quad-core Xeon processors and 16GB of RAM.]
CPU usage while playing a Flash encoded video file in Safari
CPU usage while playing a video in Safari using the HTML5 video tag
Now, while I support Apple’s push for web standards, it is clear that Flash isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In my opinion, I feel Apple should at least give users the ability to enable/disable the Flash plugin via system settings in their mobile devices. In the meantime, it appears that several websites are already releasing iPad optimized websites, including CNN, ESPN, Vimeo, and several others. Apple has published a comprehensive list of iPad optimized websites.