The other death of flash: netbooks
Just a quick note for another item that will be the death of flash: Netbooks.
As the computer market continues to move down in CPU power, price and size, the ability of a standard netbook to run sites like hulu.com has become questionable. The little Atom 1.6GHz processor just doesn’t have enough oomph to play large-format videos. (Youtube.com works great, its just the other sites that are pushing larger resolutions and larger bitrates and more sophisticated codecs).
Additionally, flash is just something that sits there on web pages using up your CPU, and that means that it’s using up your battery, which is bad. So, I’ve disabled flash altogether (via FlashBlock) on my netbook’s configuration, and I’m tempted to do so on my desktop machines as well. FlashBlock gives a nice “click to play” experience that I really prefer over the default of many sites which is to just start playing flash videos & sound as soon as you enter the page.
Maybe the netbook processors are going to improve, and maybe that means that in another year or so flash won’t be such a big deal, but in the interm, I think Adobe is in a pretty bad situation, especially due to the mobile factors I mentioned in my last post…
I didn’t read your last post but I just thought I’d add that the problem isn’t strictly the low powered atom’s but rather the inefficient flash player.
The same FLV that will play badly using adobe flash player will work fine if loaded into VLC on the same machine.
Flash 10.1 will solve the issue for those netbooks with ION GPUs via hardware accelleration. They should be able to play 1080p flash files when that comes out. It will at least beta by the end of the year. It probably means I can buy one of these mininotebooks for my little girl and let her play all those free Flash games at a decent frame rate as well. No need to get some pointless Nintendo portable game playing system.