In all the hub-bub about the iPad (needlessly btw — it’s a hobbled consumer toy and nothing more) Apple has been proposing that the Flash Player is the biggest cause of crashes on the Mac.
Recently I’ve been seeing remote data requests randomly dropping when requested from Flash Player based swf content. I’m sure that Adobe could enlighten me about why these requests would fail but in general if you request an image or some other element, in Apple’s operating system you may receive the ‘response’ that an image has been received prior to the image actually being delivered as data. This would cause any flash movie coded to load data to fail if the Event request returns COMPLETE but the actual data is null until a period of time has passed (I’ve seen 206′s and 200′s returning data AFTER the request has completed). In fact if you code poorly in Flash (handling the Event.COMPLETE and ignoring the content that is returned — just adding the Loader class to the display list using addChild and when the actual data is received the loader will display the data) then you won’t see the issue — but during this weird issue you may see the beachball of death on the Mac if the swf has been coded with the reasonable expectation that the returned data will not be null. If a Flash Player can cause stability issues this is not a problem of a plug in for the browser but it indicates an inherent issue with the operating system that doesn’t do proper process blocking and multitasking. The flash player is a simple dll process and if you have such a poorly built operating system that a dll can crash it then you’ve got real problems and are masking them by blaming folks for coding to your specs and expecting that you’ll get a good experience.
In a regular browser experience this isn’t an issue since the request isn’t as intelligent as a request from a Flash Player based request. There’s no validation generally to whether the image has been received and data loaded into the img src of an html page since that doesn’t really factor into the equation.
What does this mean? Well, this has been a progressive experience issue, that Apple has modified over a period of time rather than immediately.
Is this on purpose? I have no clue, but it does appear to target experiences such as those of Flash and Silverlight as opposed to the browser img loading experience. It just seems odd that they would announce that the Flash Player is the biggest issue for stability after introducing these kinds of changes and recording these issues. I wonder if they would go back in time to an earlier version of the flash player prior to introduction of Mac OS 10.4 and show us the results of the Flash Player experience prior to introduction of the Apple experience of the iPhone where they first targeted the Flash Player as an item that would be considered an experience issue.
I’m just posting my observation since I use both Mac and PC operating systems and have switched to the PC from the mac cause at least the PC doesn’t have these issues that the Mac is experiencing.
Funny, two years ago I would have said the opposite.
I’ve got an example of a link that works great on a PC, but fails on a Mac and it appears that randomly the slate image will return a null value:
Check it out.
