Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Welcome to the Adobe® Flash® Player 10.2 beta. Flash Player 10.2 introduces new features and enhancements, including a new video hardware acceleration model that enables dramatically enhanced video playback performance."

2009 is a year Adobe would probably like to try and forget; it was the year they became the whipping boys for seemingly all that ails Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, and, oh, a few others. I'm not nearly as opposed to Flash as some people are. Yeah, I've had my fair share of complaints about Flash causing browser instability, but I haven't had problems with Flash in quite a while. Version 10.2 brings some nice improvements to the otherwise under-utilized GPU in most computer systems, and it looks like Adobe is on the right track when it comes to improving performance. Once the software developers at Adobe finish fixing Flash, they should all be assigned to Adobe Premiere Elements - because there's an app that needs some serious help.

"In the last couple of years, it has become trendy to bash the Adobe Flash Player. I need to say a few things on that subject. First, let's be very clear: I'm not on the Flash team. I don't speak for them. (I don't speak for anyone but myself.) This post is just my personal take on things. Caveat lector. I came to Adobe ten years ago to build an open standards (SVG)-based Web animation tool. I like standards, and I have some experience here. Both authoring for & competing with the Flash Player gave me some good perspective."

Flash is a flawed product - what software isn't though - yet is has managed to advance the Web in a variety of ways, not the least of which is making online streaming video an easy to use reality. This is a really interesting article written by an Adobe employee that takes a critical look at the state of Flash and the technologies that are vying to replace it. Flash might be sometimes obnoxious - especially when it's used to create advertising banners that crash every browser out there - but it's also tremendously powerful, giving rise to world-changing sites like YouTube.

You'd think that with all the browser development out there, browser stability problems would be a thing of the past - but perhaps any advances in stability are being offset by the increasingly broad range of technologies that browsers are required to support. The above is a screen shot from Google Chrome - about 90% of the time, when I go to a Facebook status update page, typically to respond to a comment someone else made about my status update, Google Chrome will hang. My CPU usage spikes and that browser tab becomes non-responsive. Thankfully, I can keep using other tabs and eventually Chrome will either process my request to kill that tab, or finally acknowledge that there's a problem with the content in that tab and show me the above messag. I wrote about my problems with certain Flash banners crashing my browser over on my personal blog, so me having with browsers isn't a new issue. Is anyone else out there using Google Chrome and seeing the same sort of problem with Facebook status pages? The good news here is that Google is apparently aware of the problem...but who knows how long it will take to get fixed.