Adobe vows fix for sluggish Flash in Chrome OS
updated 06:15 pm EST, Thu December 9, 2010
Adobe says Flash in Chrome OS a work in progress
Adobe's Senior Director of Engineering Paul Betlem apologized on Thursday for the state of Flash in Chrome OS on the Cr-48 netbook. Following criticisms (and Electronista impressions) that Flash on the netbook is very sluggish and often unusable for video, Betlem acknowledged that hardware video acceleration and optimization wasn't in place. He declined to give a timeframe but did say the update would come automatically.
"In terms of Chrome notebooks specifically, as with many aspects of the device, Flash Player 10.1 support remains a work in progress," he said. "Video performance in particular is the primary area for improvement and we are actively working with the engineers at Google to address this. Enabling video acceleration will deliver a more seamless experience on these devices."
Linux has received the least attention of all platforms where Adobe supports Flash, but the current state of the plugin potentially creates trouble for those part of the early access program for Chrome. With many of the titles in the Chrome Web Store based on Flash and web apps a central focus, the rough condition could leave testers with limited functionality for a long time.
A fix should be in place by the time finished Chrome OS computers ship from Acer and Samsung in mid-2011, but the lack of polish has underscored concerns about attempts to drive Flash on to low-end platforms. Flash for Android already uses hardware acceleration but still suffers from performance issues in some areas. Versions of Flash for BlackBerry, webOS and other platforms also haven't reached any publicly known test phases despite being promised early in 2009, outside of the yet to be released PlayBook.
Apple is one of the few holdouts refusing Flash on low-end hardware and has pointed to performance and long development times for suitably fast Flash as some of its key reasons.
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In other news, an Adobe spokesperson was stricken with a rare outbreak of honesty and candor. Symptoms of this include being frank and up-front about how awful Flash video delivery is, and admitting that despite claiming to have worked on this problem for years, in point of fact they only really started trying to fix Flash when Apple publicly called them out on it and are playing serious catch-up to the new reality of portable devices.
Side effects include paying lip service to HTML5. Cases of Adobe Honesty are extremely rare, and if they reach the stage where the affected employee is frank enough to say out loud that Apple's actions will ultimately benefit anyone who uses Flash on any platform by forcing them to re-craft the concept to be lean and mean or face irrelevancy, the condition is likely terminal.