14 DAY TRIAL // Edible Apple has posted an interview with Anup Mura, Adobe’s director of technology strategy and development for the Flash platform, which addresses some of the common complaints against Flash. It has become widely known by now that Apple dislikes Adobe’s business in that it moves slow, or doesn’t integrate well with Apple hardware. On the other hand, Apple’s iPhone and iPad will never deliver the full Internet experience without Flash, although it certainly claims so.
Reportedly, one of the reasons Apple decided to skip Flash on the iPad was battery life. During a meeting with one of its partners (the Wall Street Journal), Apple’s CEO claimed that, “The iPad's battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash,” according to a report by Gawker Media.
In regards to these claims, Anup Mura’s response was, “We’re using the same video hardware, we’re using the same graphics hardware, we’re moving more things off the CPU into hardware acceleration that gives us similar performance and similar profile as all these other devices.” Mura then went to highlight some of the improvements Flash users could expect to see in the upcoming 10.1 version. According to Edible Apple, his argument was the following:
“We’ve actually done some optimizations to look at where flash is on a web page, and if content is off-screen, we actually suspend that flash instance, so that there’s extra processing not happening off-screen. Browsers don’t necessarily do that, web pages don’t necessarily do that, we’ve actually been able to be thinking about this problem more broadly and it’s not just about what can we do in the runtime and using hardware better, but also be thinking about how the application or the webpage is being rendered, and what is being rendered on the screen, where are we in memory.”
As the source site notes, it will take more than just these small steps to build a solid relationship with Apple, where the latter will start supporting Flash. Apple has also confirmed that it prefers the HTML5 standard, and has expressed its beliefs that it will replace Flash in the future.