why is adobe air so slow

Question

I tried air for a few applications such as tweetdeck, ebay, however they are prohibitively slow, I'm using a ubuntu 8.04 system.

Is this a common issue ?

In my first thought, AIR should be faster than web-browsing,

1. AIR only need to get the "data", and locally store the "format"
2. the dynamic effects are taken care of by FLEX rather than javascript,which should be faster.

what's your opinion?

Answer 1

Well I mean there are numerous reasons you could be wrong.

• Time to load the AIR environment on your system is slow
• Browser viewing is typically optimised; different parts are downloaded independantly
• AIR may do misc things to be slow [writing to disk, etc]
• Rendering in AIR may be more complex, hence slow

It's really hard to make a judgement like this though, because like anything, it depends on how well the implementation is written.

Obviously though, if it's slow for you then it's just slow. Go with whatever you want.

I'm not quite sure what your question is.

Answer 2

It's a known issue - Flash/Flex for Linux is not as fast as the Windows version, AIR could not help this much, it's just a shell for executing Flex.

This question is really for SuperUser - I vote for moving it there.