By Brandon Miniman from PocketNow.com brought us one of the more interesting comparisons between a Froyo-enabled Nexus One and some other competing phones. He compared the Nexus One’s browser performance to both the iPhone’s and the HTC HD2’s stock browsers (stock browser on newer HTC Sense-enabled WinMo devices is Opera Mobile, and iPhone’s is Safari Mobile).
While the obvious difference between all three of these experiences is the Flash browser, Miniman wasn’t all that impressed with the plugin’s performance. Specifically, it made browsing choppy and slow on pages that had even minimal amounts of embedded Flash content. A few of the demos he ran performed smoothly – such as playing a couple of Flash games and playing a video on YouTube – but the system seemed to get bogged down over time (he even got a notification that his Nexus One was low on space).
The story is much different when there’s no Flash content to deal with, however, as we see the Nexus One spring ahead of its competitors when running a Flash-less Amazon.com. From what I could tell, that beta tag for Flash Mobile 10.1 should be taken very seriously as it doesn’t seem to play nicely with Android’s resources right now. How has Flash been to some of you who grabbed the Android 2.2 update early?
Duh!!!! What does he expect for a BETA, enough said.
That and 2.2 isnt a full working OS yet.
Set on-demand load of plugins and execute Flash only when you need, solved
Also Duh!!! Flash adds much more content to download. Of coarse it’s going to take slightly longer to load.
So far.. my experiences with flash have been great. Yes SOME websites don’t play the video perfect, but many do. Flash is a great FEATURE to have and the fact that this is only a beta makes me a lot more excited about whats to come.
And again, if your not happy with flash…just turn it off. Its called having options.
Is there a way to turn flash off? I dont really care about flash on my phone and I’d rather have a faster browser.
Yes it can be turned off in the settings. You can turn it back on when you really need it
Nexus One with Flash as fast as iPhone
Nexus One without Flash must faster than iPhone
Android FTW!
Looks like Steve Jobs is right.
If flash is making nexus one the slowest browser; Id rather not have flash.
Sean, in such case just don’t install it. It comes separately as any other app.
Why is he using opera? Opera is a piece. it’s not even recognized as a real browser by android.
.
fail.
Haven’t played with it too much — just installed it last night — but it’s reasonably successful. Does bog down on different sites (CNN), but not on others (ESPN). Incidentally, I’m running the Skyfire browser to get full sites instead of mobile, but Flash plays well on that, too — NOT the separate video Skyfire video player.
Well unfortunately this looks to be at the moment turning out how I figured. I’ve been called a Flash hater because of it but the truth is in the pudding. Flash sucks on *nix machines (Linux OS X and now Android) and theres no denying it. Now I’ve become an Apple hater lol but Jobs is right on this one. Everytime my Linux laptop gets sluggish its because of Flash…nothing else can slow it down in even the slightest way. It spikes processors and makes even my quiet Vaio sound like a jet at times. And don’t rest your hopes on this being a beta. Flash 10.1 for Linux has been in alpha or beta long enough with no signs of ever coming out or improving.
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So I guess I’m back to my pro HTML 5 rants. To hell with Flash games. With the combo of HTML 5 canvas and JIT compiling for Java on Android theres more than enough options to build games without Flash. And video is already a done deal with the WebM project so Adobe can either get Flash right or take a hike.
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And I bet Jobs will make light of this at their conference in June. Thats why I said Adobe had better get this right or stay home. Its going to cast a negative light on Android.
Well I use Dolphin as my main browser anyway. So I will just use the built in browser to watch flash videos and play flash games.
Interesting, I just tried the pocketnow site on my HTC Desire with Flash Lite, and it doesn’t cause any such slow-down… I’d say that’s a good sign that this will be improved in future releases of Flash on Android.
I must say this is a horrible review.. Why don’t you tell people your a retard for not realizing you never closed an app on your nexus one? Also why don’t you tell everyone the reason your iPhone was beating the nexus one was because your out of memory and your iPhone can’t multi-task… Why don’t you show people flash content once you rebooted the phones from a fresh boot? … Just another reviewer trying to boost Apple and attempting to burn Google’s “beta projects.” At least Google does Beta and doesn’t have to let people steal their devices to give it a rating boost.
@ Phil I havnt had any problems with Flash slowing down my Linux Laptop, there are occasional video “flashing” if you will but nothing to complain about performance wise. Good thing though Android 2.0+ devices are HTML5 AND Flash(2.2+) compatible for the picky people and Android users have a choice, thats something the Apple crowd dont have.
As many have said, this isn’t a requirement for your browser.
You don’t want it at all…don’t install (the beauty of it being a separate add on).
If you want it, but only for those special sites, go to settings and choose “on demand” for plug in settings. It will let you choose which Flash items you want to play.
Even for a beta, it does work very nicely. But the best part of it is being able to choose when you want to use it.
So this noob runs dozens of apps on nexus one and only one app on iphone (thanks steve for no multi tasking) and then calls it a fair comparison. What BS. This is a good blog, but do some research before posting such drivel.
This is a pretty dumb review. Compare two phones lacking a feature against a phone that has a feature. What this reviewer wasn’t saying about the iPhone – “iDon’t do Flash”.
And based on all the sites he went to, many of them do Flash. Go Android!!!
Wait a minute, did we just conclude that Flash 10.1 beta on Froyo sucks because its a few milliseconds slower in loading webpages with Flash content than the iPhone loads them WITHOUT FLASH CONTENT??? You know what, I got home faster than my wife after work yesterday. Of course she stopped to buy groceries. LoL.. she sucks at driving.
The dude seems a tad negative and latching on to his iPhone luv. Why uninstall it? Just set to “on demand”. If he is so fickle on waiting a second or two more that he wants to lose all Flash function by uninstalling, he has other compulsive issues to deal with ;) That or an iPhone cultist.
Wait –
The intro to his video states the he’s trying to see if Google has the fasted web browser. BUT then he loads FLASH on it too? That’s not a correct test.
As we saw, Android DID have the fastest web browser. Once you use flash, yes it does slow down.
Also, I’m assuming this is the “unreleased” Froyo that popped up that so many people have trouble with.
Still an interesting video though. It still is nice to be able to do flash at all.
Wow, ignoring that this test was poorly conducted and biased. Even if android w/flash installed loads a second or two slower in the browser, I will make that time up by not having to open a youtube player to watch every video. Thank you google and adobe.
By the way, in case anyone cares.
PocketNow.com sites sucks for HTML, JS and CSS. It doesn’t follow standards so yeah ok great benchmark Brian!
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100524_6V1/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pocketnow.com&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.pocketnow.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.767
116 XHTML Errors! MY God! Fix your damn website PocketNow, it sucks on my browser much less my mobile phone. Ridiculous!
Also, something that everyone needs to remember:
#1. it is beta
#2. what brand of 2.2 was this? pre-release? etc
#3. blog sites an full of ads, and ads that break normal browsers due to bad coding on the developers part
#4. Adobe has a set list of optimizing your flash content for 10.1 and mobile delivery.
Once again HTML, JS and Images can kill a browser, much less a mobile device.
Bad code creates bad experiences not the plugin’s themselves.
well, it looks like Froyo is a clear winner. Plus having the option to load flash content is always a plus (not a negative as you tried to imply).
The whole test seems to prove S Jobs right. It’s heavy and most of what you’ll get is ads and games designed for desktop use and it’ll slow the page loading, again, mostly for ads.
I’ll probably give it a pass when froyo gets release.
The guy that did the review was very stupid because he didn’t close all the running apps on the nexus one before he did that test, and not only that, he had the flash running, damn noob doing comparisons. That guy is a moron.
@Paul
Please don’t fall in that trap and think that flash is no good on mobile, pocketnow did a round 2 of their test and tested the browser with flash “on demand” only and the new android browser beat iphone+HD2 easily.
Google it
sorry, I mean
@BErio