Flash Player 8 on the Mac | mikedowney|blog

Flash 8 14 Aug 2005 02:26 pm

Flash Player 8 on the Mac

We’ve received a lot of feedback from our users that the Flash Player on the Mac is much slower than the Player on Windows. There are a variety of technical reasons for this that I wouldn’t have the knowledge to explain. However – there is good news for Mac users out there…

As Tinic Uro, Principal Engineer for the Flash Player, explains in a post on his weblog, the new Flash Player 8 for the Mac has added support for OpenGL.

From the post:

“So, in essence it means that the Flash Player will use OpenGL on OS X 10.2 or newer to display its content if the machine meets the requirements. This is the direct result of working with some Apple engineers which were really helpful in getting us to be confident with these changes. In addition almost every core rendering routine now has an AltiVec implementation, you should see that when profiling using Shark. We spend a lot of time on this in this release.”

* Note: There is currently a bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298961) in Firefox for the Mac that causes very poor performance. The bug has been logged and is being addressed by the Mozilla team. Until then we recommend that Mac users use Safari for browsing Flash content on the Mac.

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Comments to “Flash Player 8 on the Mac”

on 14 Aug 2005 at 4:46 pm 1.John Dowdell said …

Thanks for the citation on that Bugzille entry, Mike… I had heard of that “slower in certain Firefox” problem before, but had trouble finding it in Bugzilla.

But… hmm… is this the right entry? It’s talking more about redraw issues wehen OpenGL is used and tabs are switched.

I tried searching in Firefox entries for term “flash macintosh slow”, and still got too many mixed hits. Besides the URL, is there a unique search term which can bring up this report in the future? (I think it could come up a lot on the Macintosh discussion boards.)

Is the “mac slow” symptom associated with Firefox entry #298961, or is the source info available through some other entry in that database?

tx, jd

on 15 Aug 2005 at 6:47 am 2.interfaSys said …

From the Powerflasher test suite, we can still see that V8 for Mac is still much slower than the one on PC, even with a dual G5. Will the improvements only show up in the final version of the player?

on 15 Aug 2005 at 7:27 am 3.John Dowdell said …

“interfaSys”, it would be good to know *what* you find slower… animations, scripting, certain visual effects, download times, and (as Mike noted above!) which browsers…!!

jd/mm

on 15 Aug 2005 at 9:59 am 4.philip said …

It would be interesting to see what the performance would be on one of the Intel X86 macs.

You may have to get someone outside of the Apple beta program to do the reporting. Somebody at Macromedia must be in the loop?

on 15 Aug 2005 at 12:41 pm 5.Adam said …

Flash player 8.0.5.0 is still drastically slower on the mac

I have been developing a multiuser site recently on mac and deployed from a mac , whith my imac g5 , it is far slower than Flash Player 7 on a celeron 333 i worry , the animation is slower , it feels stickier and on an older mac it can be stupidly slow – safari and firefox v ie and firefox see URL (please bear in mind this is development link and may not work 24/7)

on 15 Aug 2005 at 9:00 pm 6.Richard said …

http://www.amfam.com/customer/tours/default.asp (link to flash)
http://acmewebworks.typepad.com/flash/2005/08/flash_8_samples.html (matrix and video effect)
http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com/websites/081_vs_bluelondon/index.htm

I’ve tried all of these on a Pentium 3, Windows XP SP 2, 512 mb ram, and on my iBook g4 933mHz 640 mb ram. They all run noticeably slower on the mac. And when I say slower, I mean in the animation that happens in each.

on 16 Aug 2005 at 4:56 am 7.interfaSys said …

From the bench results DB, you can extract cubes to see where the Mac has problems. It seems Macs are slow at those two tests: embed video and curve polygons.

http://www.powerflasher.de/bench/res.php

The test is not a 100% reliable, but there is a clear difference in rendering speed between the two architectures. It was painful demonstrating advanced stuff on a customer’s Mac with Flash 7, I was hoping Flash 8’s performance on Macs would have been improved a little more.

on 16 Aug 2005 at 3:25 pm 8.Adam said …

I have tested to see if framerate is an issue as the animations are slower , but FP8.0.5.0 on a imac g5 achieves higher rates than a celeron 333 , but the animation is quicker on the PC and smoother, link currently has framerate displayed

on 17 Aug 2005 at 6:34 am 9.Kai said …

We have recently launched an extensive ad campaign using transparent Flash activated by layers and almost had to pull the campaign because it was impossible to play back on a Mac G5 with Flash 8 installed. I agree with interfaSys that this is a major concern and must be addressed.

Any official word on the improvements between now and final launch on Flash Player 8 on the mac?

on 21 Aug 2005 at 3:14 am 10.wolf2k5 said …

The Flash player performance issue on the Mac platform is really annoying and is preventing us from deploying any complex Flash application, since a lot of end-users use Macs.

I use a Mac myself and playing any Flash movie with Firefox significatively slowns down my PowerBook!

Please fix it asap.

Thanks.

on 27 Aug 2005 at 3:49 am 11.sharman said …

I too have noticed big differences in performance with my projects. Many of my clients are using macs and i thought they would be finally addressing this with version 8.
But what is all this stuff about the flash player on the mac using opengl? Is the beta already using it? I hope not. Maybe it will be in the final version.
I love that quote from that guy

“You probably have seen that Mac performance is ’slightly’ better on some machines”

on 02 Sep 2005 at 8:23 am 12.cL said …

This is complete garbage. Ive followed the hopes of a faster, more reliable flash plug in for the Mac web browsers’s Flash Player since using Flash 4 in the year 2000.

Ive been on the phone with India Tech support for an hour today and of course, they’ve never heard of any issue’s with the flash player on a web browser on the Mac. Well, I refused to corrispond VIA email and finally spoke with a Tech support agent specifically about this issue.

Its quite annoying doing any Flash projects now, and I feel as though Ive wasted my time learning Flash alltogether.

Plus, (In tech supports words), “I have NO “STRAIGHT” ANSWERS” as to why, how or when it will be resolved, making me look like a complete bafoon when my boss asks me why our clients web intro’s are 1/3rd slower then the file I showed them off line (regular flash player, not in a web browser).

My concern was esclated to an Engineer, who will supposedly email me with “straight” answers to resolve this instance, although considering this has been ongoing since Flash 4, and has been well documented since 2001 from a quick Google search, key word “Macintosh Slow Flash Player”, I wont hold my breath.

We’ll see….

For the record, I run several Dual G5’s and the oldest machine in my studio is a 17″ Powerbook G4. Of the half dozen G5’s and Powerbooks, my old junky Compaq laptop I bought in 2001 and have never updated plays Flash files perfectly, quite sad.

on 07 Sep 2005 at 2:17 pm 13.Mike Downey said …

Hi cL -

Sounds like you’ve had a bad experience with customer service. Feel free to email me directly with any more feedback/questions and I’ll be happy to help you out.

mdowney (at) macromedia (dot) com

MD

on 08 Sep 2005 at 7:18 am 14.cL said …

I appreciate your time Mr. Downey, and I have sent an email to you. However, I think the world would appreciate a truthful public answer that should be posted here.

As expected, no one from Macromedia tech support or anyone else I have contacted at Macromedia thus far has responded, or been able to give me a clear understanding to a questions that need go ignored no longer:

Why is the flash player virtually unuseable as it is so slow on a Macintosh based web browser?

When will the web browser flash player on a Macintosh realistically be resolved, and work as well as it does on any PC?

Why is Macromedia so dodgy about the subject, or a realistic answer?

I am quite dissapointed in this products ability to provide the performance playback online versus what I design.

I have been looking into this for quite some time and as of late have decided to look into it even further, as much as I can, until I receive a realistic response to all of my questions.

If you are able to answer any of my questions, I and I’m sure everyone would greatly appreciate it. If not, please ask within your resources any questions that you are unble to answer truthfully yourself.

Thanks again.

We look forward to a resolve.

on 21 Sep 2005 at 1:11 am 15.Andrew Knott said …

I agree with CL… This is a serious issue and I wish Macromedia would at least admit to a problem with the Mac player. This sort of thing, as well as the continued buggy performance of the Mac IDE make a joke of your marketing claims. To be totally honest, if Apple or Microsoft made such a poor development IDE they’d be out of business.

on 21 Sep 2005 at 1:14 am 16.Andrew Knott said …

Also, that OpenGL stuff while interesting, is a distraction from the real issue. If a decent G4 can throw around some complex 3d vectors in many more FPS in applications other than Flash, its clear where the bottleneck is…

on 05 Oct 2005 at 2:03 am 17.Y.Simkin said …

I’m glad that unlike most debugging in flash that eventually leads to my discovery of yet another undocumented flaw, this particular trauma only lasted about 10 minutes, before I was smart enough to google.

You’d think that macromedia has no Macs in their building. It’s not as though this behavior is hard to locate! Fire up any swf that has anything even slightly animated in it, across a few MCs and bingo. And as for it supporting OpenGL… umm… where’s the API for that?! I’ve been waiting for 3D support in flash for 6 years. So… now it’s in there, but only insofar as to bring osX to its knees? F’in BRILLIANT… A++!

on 10 Oct 2005 at 7:01 am 18.dergoog said …

OHHHH This hurts. The original post on this group was back in August – Macromedia was directly requested to give a response in September – nothing…?

I wonder if the excessive frame rates are to blame? On a PC I have seen people put in 66 FPS and the player runs it as fast as it can, but on the mac – the higher the frame rate, the slower it goes… is it actually trying to render every single frame? thus slowing it down. Or am I silly to think that the PC is willing to drop frames for the sake of the timeline?

on 10 Oct 2005 at 7:22 am 19.dergoog said …

Well, I am not even sure of my last comment- clicking the link on my name will take you to a movie that is run at 120 fps – watching it run on a PC – it is so fast it actually looks like it hurts the shapes to stop so abruptly. However on the mac player, V8 in safari and firefox – it runs at the same speed it did when specified at 45 fps witch is close to the 24 fps rate on a PC. (however when speced at 24 fps, and run on the mac – it runs like 12 fps on a PC).

I have become a die hard Mac fan, and like everyone else – I am very disappointed in Flash’s performance on the mac. WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT? It never ran this slow on my Fedora box?

Ugggh….

on 20 Oct 2005 at 8:33 am 20.Sandy Cooke said …

Click on my name below to view the reason I no longer trust a single word that Macromedia utters.

It doesn’t involve any curves, just simple maths, and in every Mac browser I have tested it in it runs at or below 60% of the standalone player’s performance.

There is a marginal (maybe 5%) improvement when using FP8 as opposed to FP7 – where is the miraculous performance boost as heralded here and elsewhere?

I am inclined to agree with the guy above that feels that all his time spent learning Flash has been wasted – why create anything with Flash when it perfroms like cr*p on a Mac? If it weren’t for major issues such as this I am sure many more people would commit their career to Flash. Fix it, dammit!

To vent further, let me add that I am astonished that people have been so complimentary about Flash 8’s text rendering. A side-by-side comparison with any browser-rendered text illustrates to me that Flash text is still an absolute eyesore.

on 23 Oct 2005 at 7:47 pm 21.Kwun Yeung said …

I got the same problem too. It’s just SLOOOOOOW!!! in Mac. I supposed the performance of Flash Player 8 is a lot faster than 7 but i experienced the opposite way. I just really really troublesome to build something on my machine and test it on with colleague’s window machine. Please fix it!!

on 24 Oct 2005 at 10:37 am 22.MGMead said …

So, is it implied that if we drive the FPS rate down, the movies will run better?

I’ve also found that, when we have two animations running at once, (e.g. the movie itself and an animated banner at top), the functionality of the entire page gets so bad that you can’t capture the event of a click. In essence, the page slows to a crawl, and is unusable.

Even a kludgy workaround would be better than silence.

on 31 Oct 2005 at 1:01 pm 23.Jimmy said …

Yes!Yes! finally people are talking about this obviously huge disaster that is the macromedia flash player on an Apple Mac. It is soooo dissapointing. I am a HUGE mac fanatic and do not even own a MAC. Why? For the single reason that flash performance on the mac platform is pathetic! We all know that. I am dying to see if maybe the switch to Intel chips on Apple machines has any effect???

Could the problem lie with Apple?

Macromedia can no longer avoid the subject.. Not now! Not when it is so painfully obvious that this is a massive problem. What site does not make use of the flash plugin these days!

We are all just so frustrated. When will it be fixed. Do you even care about fixing it.. if not just tell us. We can take it…

Arrrr.

on 14 Nov 2005 at 6:15 am 24.Matt said …

This problem is becoming unbearable. We’re getting higher demand for more interactive sites and researching on the net we’re finding some truly great Flash sites that just slow to a crawl on a Mac (try the new Narnia site on a 17″ powerbook, its painful).When your studio runs a gamut of Macs and a single PC its difficult selling a Flash site to clients when you know they work terribly on your preferred system.

on 15 Nov 2005 at 2:22 pm 25.Mats Björnström said …

This is a huge issue. I cannot even visit the most popular news site in Sweden http://www.aftonbladet.se/ without FireFox or Safari taking up 60% CPU. If I open four tabs with differnt news stories, the browser locks up hard every time. I am using a dual 2.5GHz G5 with 3GB ram.

Macromedia really needs to solve this – yesterday.

on 07 Dec 2005 at 5:41 pm 26.PATHETIC said …

Honestly Macromedia, what do you expect Mac users to do, open IE in VPC just to browse at anything approaching acceptable speed? It’s truly sad but that is actually faster than using the native plug-in. It’s obvious our feedback is falling on deaf ears and frustration is rapidly giving way to apathy. Goodbye Flash. You always were a headache, and you always were a bore.

on 09 Dec 2005 at 11:33 am 27.cL said …

I’m still waiting for a response.

Its been 3 months.

Macromedia, you guys are definitely considered a joke in terms of support and solutions at this point. I should return all of my software for a full refund since, in certain terms “services were not rendered”.

I feel a class action lawsuit is approaching. You have been given an opportunity to resolve this serious issue and your continued lack of response will necessitate action.

on 12 Jan 2006 at 5:02 pm 28.Aspergers said …

It’s 2006 now. Why hasn’t anything been done about the mac speed issues? Its almost impossible to browse a web page that has simple flash-based advertisements.

Advertisers are even starting to show *text ads* with no animation at all, and even these slow don scrolling in safari on my year old G4 Powerbook (which was top of the line when I bought it).

I run my own website with flash based ads and mac users complain about the speed problems all the time. Why hasn’t anything been done about this problem?

on 30 Jan 2006 at 7:35 pm 29.Prabu Singh said …

I’ve recently noticed this also, and the slower flash animating on a Mac has nothing to do with the computer. I run a Quad 2.5, and an Intel P4HT.

I’m not sure what the source of the problem is, but a Flash website that suns smooth & quickly on Windows XP IE6 displays choppy & slow on OS X.4 Safari 2.

on 19 Feb 2006 at 9:46 pm 30.DrNeroCF said …

FLASH 8 RUNS FINE IN THE STANDALONE PLAYER ON MAC, YET RUNS REALLY, REALLY SLOW IN EVERY BROWSER ON MAC.

Do you guys plan on ever fixing this? Seriously, there is a huge issue with the flash plugin. It’s slower than 7, and no amount of bitmap caching can make up for the problems you guys left in the plugin. Unity runs great in Safari, Anark runs just dandy, and those are both made by small companies. You guys are a joke, I’m Flash game developer, working on a legal Flash 8, and I can’t even play my own games on anything but the standalone player.

This is pathetic.

on 21 Feb 2006 at 4:20 pm 31.Benny said …

I thought I was the only one with the problem that Flash sites (animations) run SLOW on the Mac. I’ve been using a Mac for 3 weeks now and I’ve never had this experience with Windows pc’s.
It’s really annoying, even simple animations in runs choppy. I hope this get fixed!!!

on 21 Feb 2006 at 4:22 pm 32.Jenneke said …

Me too I just bought a new iMac and Flash sites run very slow on my computer!! Please fix it!

on 23 Feb 2006 at 10:49 am 33.Ron said …

Please, Please, Please do something about the speed. I spent too much money on the last versions of Flash to get such slooooow performance.

Also, when will the Universal Binary version of the Flash 8 player be posted to your web site? I know it exists because it comes with Intel Macs (Safari). The probelm is that if you make the mistake of installing Studio and forget to omit the Flash plugin, you’re forced to reinstall your OS. If you do forget, the plugin is overwritten and you lose your Flash support in the Safari. Since you guys are still working on improving peformance, you can at least give us this plugin so that we don’t get totally left out in the cold. I have a Macbook Pro and forgot to do this.

Thanks

on 04 Mar 2006 at 6:01 am 34.sharman fenn said …

The performance of flash via any browser on the mac is pathetic. I am a web designer and I use Safari as the lowest benchmark possible when testing but overall I know, if something works ok on a mac it will fly on a PC. But it is frustrating. Most of my clients are using Macs and testing is done on that format. You almost have to redo an entire site to run in flash on a mac, even on high end macs. The performance is a joke and macromedia and apple are in denial about this.

on 04 Mar 2006 at 9:57 am 35.pj said …

One more vote from me. Everything is already said, please just fix it.

on 04 Mar 2006 at 12:58 pm 36.ross cairns said …

Having read down all these posts what’s even more stiking than the fact that performance is so crappy on a Mac is the manner in which you are all being ignored. There are really only 3 possible reasons for this.
1) They don’t care.
2) They don’t want to incriminate thmeselves.
3) They have a diabolically poor customer service.

Maybe it’s all three.
Last one to leave..turn out the lights.

on 11 Mar 2006 at 10:11 am 37.EKko said …

I’ve been between Mac and PC’s for years over this VERY issue. I’ve been a Flash developer for 7 years and demands for high performance, more sphostocated and animated sites has never been more intense. With the introduction of new filters in the Flash application and the intel Mac, I honestly thought the playing field would be leveled. I was wrong.

Last week I went to my local Apple store to test drive one and to specifically see where we were with the Flash Player. I did a clean boot of a macbook pro 2.0 gig machine, went to a site I built using Flash 8 filters and scripted animation. I was using Safari.

RESULTS: The Flash player choked and could not actually render the site – it spit out the first 15 frames, then did it’s nose dive until it was about down to 4 frames a second. Unreal. My current G4 PB runs the site better.

Macromedia, you haven’t lost a customer as I will be moving back to a lame PC to make my living, but you sure have disappointed one for keeping us all in the dark about this problem.

: ekko :

on 13 Mar 2006 at 12:43 am 38.Chris Melby said …

This page doesn’t display the comment box in Safari. Anyways, I had to use FireFox, which doesn’t bother me, but hopefully you guys will test for compatibility in all browsers?

Not to contradict ye peeps experiences with Flash’s performance on the Mac, nor dispute claims that Flash’s performance is slower on a Mac, It’s just that I’ve experience quite the opposite in general. I have noticed that player performance is quicker than running through the browsers. Ironically, early version of Safari’s plug-in were quicker than early versions of the player.

Before I ramble on, I have a XP3200(9500 Pro), MP2800(9600 XT), a G5 DP 2.5(6800U), a G4 DP 1.25 Ghz and a Powerbook(R9000Pro) 1 GHz. The PCs and my G5 are runing the lastest public version, 8,0,22,0. My PB is running 8.5 alpha. The DP 1.25 is in limbo until I can get a new desk setup and install Tiger on it. (I use the PCs for rendering support in Maya.)

(My MP2800 is turned on right now, so I’m going to pick on it.)

First of all, that Power Flasher test is jacked up when running on the Mac. And it’s not that my G5 scored blah(1286) when compared to some of the P4s and Athlons. On the Sinus Line test it gets stuck in some sort of loop, where as my PCs breeze through it and have about finished the test before the G5 moves on. Now my MP2800 scored much slower than most of the PCs on that list. It scored 1299 under IE, where as I see PCs that I know are way-way-way slower, scoring higher. A P3 800 with a GF2 mx400 scored 2167, and an Amiga 68000 7Mhz scored 1655, what’s with that??? It’s safe to say that these benchmarks are “quite” unreliable.

Now when viewing the Matrix example on my G5 which is driving a 30″ (2560×1600), it runs a bit faster than my MP2800 on a 15″ (1024×768). I can move the window around just fine on the Mac without any hiccups. On the PC it’s quite poky when doing the same.

The Video tile, (which is pretty darn cool btw,) runs at 24/25fps on my G5, and 20/21fps on my MP2800. When moving the window around on the Mac, it doesn’t drop FPS. The PC instantly drops to 17/18fps, in what little space I can move it.

My PB gets about 11fps, not bad for a 3.5 year old notebook. It drops to 9 fps when moving around the window. FYI, my PB runs circles around my old Athlon T-Bird 1 GHz when it comes to Flash, well pretty much everything that I know of.

I recently created a banner in Flash 8, which consisted of scrolling videos. It runs fine on my PB 1Ghz, but the Dells down at my friend’s business, which are a P4 2 Ghz and P4 1.8 Ghz, take a noticeable hit in performance. I figured it was because of the mediocre R7000s they were running. But never the less they do run it slower than my PB.

I know that with early version of FIreFox on the Mac, Flash performance was about 5-10 times slower than Safari. It has been much improved since then, but it’s still a bit slower on a PPC and I see there’s a bug report for it. It also runs Flash slower than IE on the PC side, btw.

Anyways, back in the early G4 days, I was on a DP 500, and ended up switching to a PC for all development, because they were so much faster. I switched back to Macs when the DP 1.25 was released, because it and the PB, as already noted, were way faster than my old Athlon. Performance since then has been great. I’ve been quite happy with my Macs when compared to my PCs and my clients PCs. There’s nothing to be ashamed of from my perspective.

So I’m not sure what the deal is with some of your peeps systems? AND how on earth does Flash run faster under VPC then a natively on a Mac? That’s complete BS!!!

A bit off topic, but it somewhat relates. I stopped using layer masks years ago, because they caused severe slow down. I only used them if no other avenue was possible. But using a some sort of cover instead of a mask, always made a massive difference. I’m grateful for Flash 8’s new masking tricks, they work great.

Sorry about his long ramble.

<]=)

on 13 Mar 2006 at 12:58 am 39.Chris Melby said …

Hey, the comments box worked under Safari this time. :) *hides in corner*

<]=)

on 14 Mar 2006 at 1:48 pm 40.FPR said …

im a flash developer and trying to simply view flash website on a macbook pro is almost impossible. im getting frame rates around 5 FPS. what are heck you guys doing over there at macromedia? flash is your product, FIX IT.

on 14 Mar 2006 at 6:32 pm 41.Chris Melby said …

Make sure you’re using the Flash Player that came with the MBPro’s CD, since it’s universal. Last I heard, if you’ve downloaded the player from their site, it only offers the PPC version regardless of the proc. So Flash player would be running under Rosetta.

How does Flash 8 run under Rosetta?

<]=)

on 22 Mar 2006 at 3:35 pm 42.Jesse said …

HEy …… I have relised that flash 8 has this realy good feture called Fillters……I LOVE This…….but why do i need this feture when every time i use it the swf slows down ….and rely disapoints me. I am so sad….please tell me there is a way to stop this…. I thought of an idea (make the movie clip be able to brake apart and keep the blur efect…ect.)

Jesse-Pro

on 09 Apr 2006 at 11:03 am 43.Darrel said …

I’ve been playing a flash game called Dofus and the difference in performance between my ancient PC laptop and my spiffy G4 is apalling. It’s excruciatingly slow on the Mac, even with quality set to low. It’s just as slow with the standalone Flash player as it is in any browser. Of course, anything Flash is slow on the Mac, as other people have said.

Macromedia has a history of releasing performance-botched products. There was a Dreamweaver MX 2004 update once which fixed some performance problems on the Mac.

Let’s hope someone over there gets it right. Maybe we should start writing Adobe now, instead.

on 12 Apr 2006 at 9:09 am 44.interactiveBoy said …

I’ve had my gripes about Macromedia in the past, but this situation is ridiculous. How could you (Macrodobe) NOT see that there is a problem? Why have you not made any public acknowledgement of the issue? If you don’t know what’s causing the problem, just say so, and let us know how you plan to resolve it. This complete lack of communication on the matter is unprofessional and borderline criminal. Your product does NOT do as advertised. Surely Macrodobe has the financial resources to invest in a few Macs for testing your products? I’m appalled at some of the posts earlier in this thread asking for specific examples because they need proof. It is slow *all around*. In some cases it is absolutely unusable.

I personally just bought a 20″ imac Intel, and the flash performance is not much better than my old dual 450 G4. Simply pathetic.

Thanks Macrodobe – you rock.

on 17 Apr 2006 at 7:18 pm 45.Jon said …

This is pretty pathetic… As if any half decent business wouldn’t have the dignity to at least admit or address a problem of this magnitude.

I can’t believe this thread is still going on AFTER 8 MONTHS, and it still hasn’t even been addressed.

Pretty weak way of doing business guys… Especially givin the amount you charge for your produ

on 24 Apr 2006 at 4:43 am 46.Jules said …

I don’t know if this is off-topic, but the flash player plug-in is also 25% slower in Firefox than in IE on a PC. Very annoying when music and animations are supposed to end at the same time.

on 31 May 2006 at 7:43 pm 47.KnightOwl said …

I wish that I had come across this thread BEFORE I spent my Christmas break learning Flash…paying for new Software, tuition and books only to find that my very first website plays like crap on a mac. I thought Flash would solve a lot of the problems I was having creating interesting web sites suited to cross browser/cross platform environments using html. I just asumed that because Flash content was being played with a flash player it would work in any environment…..silly me for expecting so much.

What peeves me the most is this…If I were to buy a car..or fridge….or washing machine or what ever….and it didn’t work… I would get a refund or it would be fixed under warranty! Software companies expect you to pay for a new version and even then most of the time bugs are not fixed or there always seems to be a new issue to deal with. If you spent as much time and money getting your products to work as you did on marketing and blowing smoke up your own asses (saying how great your products were and “wow look whats in the new version”) you would sell more products to HAPPY clients. Happy clients equate to recommendations and positive word of mouth.

Please fix this problem it has gone on for too long and is unacceptable!

on 09 Jun 2006 at 7:00 am 48.forlando said …

Looks like Mr. Downey has not mustered up enough to reply to CLs post from September 8, 2005!!!!

It is ridiculous. Apple continues to gain market share. Why don’t your programmers stop porting over code from the PC and write it from the ground up?

on 10 Jun 2006 at 1:04 pm 49.Benny said …

What about the Flash player for Intel Macs? Is the problem fixed?

on 11 Jul 2006 at 10:58 am 50.Dale Lafayette said …

Hi gang,

I’m new to this discussion, but I just experienced the exact same issue using Flash 8 Pro. After one very nerve-wracking all-nighter, I finally figured out that the problem (at least the one I experienced where my flash file slowed to a crawl on any Mac web browser) was actually my Dreamweaver html file (!) which I had set to a “transparent” window mode. When I deleted that parameter, the flash file played fine (although the PC still plays it just a tad faster). Hope this helps somebody…

Dale Lafayette
http://www.amestudios.com

on 13 Jul 2006 at 8:16 am 51.Flanders_ZA said …

Crikey, I had no idea. This is more serious than I thought. I design for flash on PC but every month I have a meeting at my client’s offices and they all run on Mac. We demo our latest updates for their site and luckily for me they’re none the wiser at this point and have not complained about the shocking framerate. I however, sit there quietly and watch my hard work go up in smoke as it plays at the speed of a powerpoint slide show.

Before I knew of this issue I actually sold them on a flash site by telling them that the flow of a flash-based site was far superior to anything else. Gee, don’t I look like a moron.

Please, this MUST be addressed.

on 06 Aug 2006 at 5:27 am 52.gary said …

hi guys i have a dual processor g5 1.8 and have just installed flash pro 8 , big problems …… it takes about 2 minutes to start up works ok but if you want to open another file up the whole application freezes ???? i have installed uninstalled a dozen times macromedia dont have any idea has anyone heard of this problem ? i have trshed prefereces and everything its really annoying

on 08 Aug 2006 at 2:23 pm 53.Demian Quiroz said …

Hello everyone! I am a “budding” developer and I have found a unique problem that I cannot seem to find an answer to. I have built a flash site here: http://www.robertovalenzuelaphotography.com – once it loads, go to the portfolio section. If you are using Safari, (All the thumbnails have to load as of this post for the first picture to load – i’m working on it!) the image doesn’t appear correctly – it gets badly distorted – although it is anchored in the right coordinate, it is sized weird. I am using an onResize() listener to change how big the portfolio area is so the images loading into the box are sized appropriately. Is there a known issue with the Stage object and coordinate systems with Safari? Please help! – this site works in Netscape on Mac – I haven’t been able to test it in Firefox. PC – works fine in IE and Firefox.

on 11 Aug 2006 at 1:32 pm 54.Evan said …

So it’s a year later and still no real resolution to this? This is embarrasing. FIX THE MAC FLASH PLUGIN!

on 12 Aug 2006 at 11:48 am 55.Mike Downey said …

> So it’s a year later and still no real resolution to this?

Not true. Flash Player 9 was just released, including a universal binary version for Intel-based Macs. Performance is fantastic.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

on 22 Aug 2006 at 10:22 am 56.Craig said …

I wouldn’t know if it’s “performance is fantastic” as the installer hangs with “4 items” remaining on my power PC running panther. The same thing happens when I try and install studio 8 only it hangs at 160 items to install. Any thoughts?

on 07 Sep 2006 at 1:05 pm 57.Mason said …

Re: flash 9 – Performance may be good on intel macs but its the same old story on older macs. Why don’t you test the thing before you make such claims?

on 07 Sep 2006 at 10:30 pm 58.Isaac G. said …

I just downloaded Flash 9 and it’s still running pretty slow on my Mac. With my G5 1.6Ghz with 1 gig of ram there is a noticeable delay with a 230K swf.

on 26 Sep 2006 at 9:39 am 59.Stian said …

I agree completely – FLASH STINKS ON MACS. Why can´t you fix it – its totally embarrassing. I can´t watch flash on my mac in either browser – it SUCKS.

on 03 Oct 2006 at 12:04 pm 60.Steve Jareki said …

Performance is not “fantastic” at all. Still the same old problems. Using Flash 8 Pro and all my swfs run terribly slow on Mac Safari and Firefox on Mac. These same swfs on the PC are fluid. I have a swf set to 60fps and it looks like it’s running 20fps, ridiculous if you ask me.

on 26 Oct 2006 at 7:45 am 61.Steve Jobs said …

Flash 9 player on Safari makes no difference. It is as slow as ever. We need to all write Adobe every day and remind them of this. It has to be fixed.

on 27 Oct 2006 at 6:50 am 62.Johnny A said …

i just purchased a G5 and it has MAC OSX 10.4.8 and every time i launch flash it doesnt do anything, then if i force quit, it states that flash is not responding, it does this with fireworks too. plese let me knwo whats going on!!

on 17 Nov 2006 at 9:28 am 63.Andre said …

Thank god – a place where people are experiencing the same things. I have just decided today that I will not be upgrading from my PowerBook G4 to an Intel Mac – I am going to buy a PC. And flash is the reason – both the application & the player. Our old P4, now being used as a DB server, runs flash brilliantly compared to my PowerBook, and even the G5 workstation. I love my mac, but cannot stay with it any longer. Flash has become such an amazing environment to fulfill so many and varied briefs – but for whatever reason, my poor mac can’t keep up :(

on 17 Nov 2006 at 12:22 pm 64.Megan said …

Why are we all being ignored? I”ve been through several sites now relating to this issue, all have countless posts with no replies or explanations. (http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=323463) Something is going on behind the curtains of Adobe/Macromedia on the issue of flash with macs.

We have bought and supported your products without disgrunt, now I think we should be given some sort of explanation as to why or what is taking so long to acknowledge. If the flash players on macs are slow and cannot be fixed reasonably, then please state that, so we all don’t keep creating flash sites that are too intensive for macs. And so that we don’t keep knocking on your door in hopes of awaiting some sort of reasoning.

Mike, out of respect for your loyal customers, for the dignity you have as an honorable citizen, please, please we beg of you, for the love of GOD, acknowledge us.

on 17 Nov 2006 at 5:13 pm 65.emmy said …

Hi,

If you are experiencing performance issues, please file a bug: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

In order for us to follow up on these claims, provide as much information as possible including but not limited to:
OS version
Browser and version
Flash Player version
URL where you are experiencing a difference in performance
Whether you can provide sample media

Thanks,
Emmy Huang
Sr. Product Manager
Flash Player

on 27 Nov 2006 at 10:24 am 66.Arthur said …

Very disappointing performance on my new Dual 3 Intel Mac. Flash 9 is crawling, comparing to my old PC. I really wish this issue was fixed, but I guess it will take many years. As a full-time Flash developer/designer who just switched to a Mac this is posing a serious problem.

on 27 Dec 2006 at 11:16 am 67.randy said …

Just so you know I tried Dale Lafayette’s post above about taking out the transparent window mode in both the object and embed tag and it seemed to work for us. Are there any repercussions we could run into down the line from this fix/hack? What the heck is the transparent wmode for anyway?

[md] Hi, Randy. Glad to hear it. Here’s a technote on the Adobe support center that might explain wmode better.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_14201

[/md]

on 31 Dec 2006 at 8:37 am 68.Bill Garnett said …

I have repeatedly tried to install Flash Player 7 OX on my iMac OS X Version 10.4.8 2.1 GHz PowerPC G5. I can not get it to work with either Safari or Firefox. Would appreciate any suggestions or assistance.

[md] Hello. Why are you trying to install Flash Player 7? The latest version of the Flash Player is version 9 and it is much faster and more secure than Flash Player 7. You can get it at http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash. [/md]

on 11 Jan 2007 at 8:35 am 69.Bill Garnett said …

Thanks Mike, I think I have version 9 installed now

on 22 Jan 2007 at 11:05 pm 70.dergoog said …

Wow… 1 year and 3 months after I posted the original comment above and no one has posted anything admitting to the problem from adobe/macromedia nor has flash 9 accumulated to anything more than another let down. I no longer develop anything in flash. A software that changes so much from version to version… Ajax all the way. Still love my mac – loving flash even less. My hopes that Adobe would turn this around have gone up in smoke as well. Cheers all – see you in another year.

Flash’s only hope for survival is the streaming server… but how long till that is eaten up by something better?

on 20 Feb 2007 at 5:23 pm 71.preauxx said …

flash runs like 2x faster on my 2-yr old powerbook g4 than it does on my brand spankin’ new macbook pro
i mean … it’s really embarassing, guys. truly.

on 26 Feb 2007 at 12:29 pm 72.Russell said …

I develop Flash apps on PC and have always avoided Macs in general because of these performance issues. Recently, I developed an app that is bound for deployment on a system that runs on Mac Minis. I found that where I was getting 30 fps all day long on my old PC, the Mac would give me average 28 with NOTHING moving… and would drop to 3 or 4 fps on standard easing motions through code.

However – when I installed the latest STANDALONE Flash 9 player on the Mac Mini, it runs the swf pretty much just as fast as the PC.

BUT – for some reason, the other Mac Minis (identical machines to this one) that we’ve tried it on, which all have Flash Player 9 running, run about the same as this one did with FP8… 3-4 fps on the animations…
I’m wondering if there was perhaps a recent fix in the player and the other machines have an older version of FP9? I also noticed that on the other machines, if you drag the Flash Player window around, the whole window redraw (mac interface) jerks around at 3-4 fps… but then you grab the fFinder window and drag it and it’s smooth as silk…

hmmm……
-r

on 29 Mar 2007 at 2:33 am 73.Demian Quiroz said …

I got it to work in Safari, although it has a few quirks… but I have been able to simulate them on my PC. I have found sparse documentation on little known facts (or bugs) in my experimentation and development in flash. Dynamic Text loaded from an html file cannot be masked easily. THAT one took me awhile. My website aforementioned (robertovalenzuelaphotography.com) uses the Stage object which I have read now is problematic when you want to retrieve the size of the Flash object on screen. I believe this was the root of my problem in Safari. I managed to fix it by painstakingly going over my code and trying bits and pieces until it worked. So, resolved so far. My next adventure will continue with my personal site: daqre.com. Thanks for all your sentiments!
D

on 29 Apr 2007 at 9:15 am 74.mabo80 said …

I have been using flash on mac since FLASH 5 and i must admit that every version for mac keeps getting worse, Flash 5 on OS 9 was quite bearable to work with and i have even produced multimedia CDs with it (although performance was nowhere compared to PC versions).

Since i switched to OSX Flash has become unbearable to the point that (despite being a diehard mac fan) i had to switch to PC because of it! Flash 8 Pro is so slow and chunky i coulnd’t bear desinging a simple flash banner! let alone produce full websites. and let’s not mention the player (browser and standalone) which are crap to say the least.

i don’t know who is the problem here if flash or OS X but something has to be done as from what i see in forums more flash designers are switching to PCs. lets just hope CS3 solves some issues but i doubt it!

[md] I think you’ll find significant improvements in performance and usability on the Mac with Flash CS3 Professional. It’s the first universal binary version of Flash for the Intel-based Mac. [/md]

on 20 Jun 2007 at 12:41 pm 75.Guille said …

Well…
I’m developing a website on my Mac(MacBookPro 17″ 2.16Ghz 2GB-ram) with Flex and Flash cs3.
I’m testing on both Safari and Firefox with Flash-Player 9.

Just some lousy as3-tweens.

Still no difference.. annoying

on 25 Jun 2007 at 11:50 pm 76.kiat said …

me too, the flash version just wont play smoothly on the mac safari, firefox with the latest flash player 9 installed…the flash was done in flash cs3…wonder whats wrong and how to even fix this issue when many people are on macs..

on 04 Jul 2007 at 6:38 pm 77.garethk said …

I’m assuming this is the real reason why were not seeing flash enabled in the browser on the iPhone – because the performance will stink and be an embarrassment to the product.

on 29 Jul 2007 at 6:14 am 78.jim said …

That’s it!!! I’m switching to PC for sure. Adobe & Apple shame on you!!

on 08 Aug 2007 at 4:27 pm 79.cL said …

Its been a while. Still, no change. Flash on any Mac based web browser is not acceptable. Nothings changed since I complained about it here, back in 2005.

I still design on a PPC Powerbook G4, but I test it on a 2000 Compaq laptop…… now thats pathetic!

Oh well, it is what it is…. be nice if someone put forth some effort to fix…. ah heck, at the very least respond to the issue, but instead it can be our little inside joke about Flash plug-ins on a Mac.

“Garbage”

Thanks again for the half-ass product.

Regards,

cL

on 31 Oct 2007 at 4:36 am 80.Eduardo said …

At the moment, there is no fix or any solution to
this big problem.

I dont know why Macromedia dont make anything about that! i cant believe it.

on 11 Feb 2008 at 7:52 pm 81.Guille said …

3 Months past since the last post… I try my luck:

Very funny how you try and do as if nobody at Adobe would know about this problem :-D

Seems like nobody there uses Apples…hmmm

on 23 Feb 2008 at 11:08 pm 82.Yvon said …

Mike Downey & Emmy Huang,

I’ve sent you a bug report from my G3 900MHz iBook running 10.4.11, 768MB RAM, Quartz Extreme enabled. Same performance under 10.3. G4 hardware platform is no different, with regard to more-than-poorest performance in Flash player. Please fix this buggy stuff. If the transparent mode thing is the fix – why not roll out a browser plugin with that enabled? SOMETHING so that it works?

You folks have the keys to the house with Apple’s engineers – i’m sure they’d help you. Everyone in the world – from the most basic, average Joe/Joelle surfer – to the professional web designer need your help with this bug. Should they all really have to file bug reports? If you want a test machine – you can try mine! Contact me any time and i’ll FedEx it. I don’t know what else you need, but even if someone at Adobe would borrow someone’s G3 or G4 … with a working screen and battery/AC adapter — they’d notice the problem right away.

Flash owns the web for animation & UI. You might not realize it but you’re shutting out a lot of respectable customers.

Thanks,
Yvon

on 20 Apr 2008 at 11:56 am 83.Christopher L. Van [L.Ninja] said …

This is just nuts. I am a very die hard mac fan as well, I work with MIT (who has a hell of a lot of macs) and our offices in Boston to design Recommendation engines…..

Anyway, I noticed that MIT is now using a lot less Flash, I am very sad to hear about people hopping ship due to Flash’s short comings on the MAC. It’s amazing how powerful apps can be.

I just felt the need to post.. it’s all the same story over here. Maybe we can remote desktop into pcs and run a browser for simple flash animations? Hahaha… my goodness.

on 19 Jun 2008 at 12:06 am 84.legal bud said …

After these two concerts, I felt that I had done the gamut. Of course, there were many other things I didn’ t get to do like the opera, the IRCAM experimental music facility, or the Shins, who were there on my last night in Paris. Yet I did have one more musical experience, which was attending what many regard as the finest techno club in Paris, Rex Club. The people I’ ve said this to have a kind of aversion immediately to the word“ techno,” but really that’ s what it was, and it was good. And like my other…

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