Flash & Flex Latency – The Unspoken Elephant in the Room
At the risk of starting a huge flame war I’ve been wanting to mention something that’s been bugging me for years about Flash and now Flex.
User Interaction Latency.
When I use a native HTML or desktop app things happen instantly. When I click a drop down it instantly snaps down, when I scroll the page instantly moves.
When I do these things in Flash (website or air) there is a user interaction lag. Very noticeable on older machines but still noticeable even on the most modern machine. Just a fraction of a second, but noticeable none the less.
I’ve spoken to other Flash Dev’s (yes, I am a Flash developer of many years) who swear there is no Latency and that Flash is just as responsive as native apps HTML or desktop apps.. I don’t get why they don’t see it.
Anyway, user interaction latency is the only reason why I don’t use flash for my personal projects such as Pluggio
Anyone else notice it? Is it just me? Or am I correct in thinking it’s the unspoken elephant in the room…?
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You can follow me on twitter @justinvincent or check out Pluggio the twitter client I’m building in jQuery.
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The reason HTML doesn’t have an interaction lag is that it loads everything up front (assuming you’re not using AJAX to populate a drop-down, etc) so when you click the drop-down, it’s just showing something that’s already been downloaded and that is easy to render.
In Flash, content is often loaded on-the-fly and is often not as easy to render as HTML. As developers, it’s our job to ensure we’re pre-loading content and optimizing the display. While we can’t get the exact same performance (HTML is simply faster to render than Flash), ideally we can minimize it as much as possible to the point that it’s not noticeable.
@Dan. I know what you mean. I’m not talking about that kind of latency. I’m talking about the split second latency that it takes for the mouse command to get to the flash engine. Or for the flash engine to render as scrolling occurs. It’s a split second slower than native stuff.
Where you say “HTML is simply faster to render than Flash”. That’s the point I’m trying to make. That’s the part that I can’t live with for any personal apps I create. IMHO.