According to Adobe, FL4 is Flash 10.1, minus optimizations that rely heavily on CPU, like gradients and such. In theory, it should work, but be uglier.

It's hard to find actual differences, and the best I've seen thus far is here. There is documentation available but unless you know what the API calls do it's hard to get a grip.

Frankly, I couldn't care less if Farmville loads on E7 - some of that stuff brings my PC to its knees, even if it would work on E7 it would have been a horrendous experience. Not that it worked on N900, but I just don't care.

What I care about is video, and basic flash, like navigation and extensions to pages. And those work in the majority of cases.

As for performance, well, it's not the device's fault, it's that as web development becomes easier, the bar is lowered and the smoldering craters that call themselves web developers (don't even get me started on people calling themselves coders or programmers) keep on spewing huge pages, like it's free, just because they don't pay for it.

Google.com: 11K (41K) - about 40 for results
Yahoo.com: 40K (550K)
Facebook.com: 500K (600K)
Engadget.com: 200K(1600K)

Above are HTML and, in parentheses, the size of the page complete with images and objects - the "full size". The HTML-only is a hint on how soon the browser can start rendering and the latter on how long it will take.

As you can see, some have a hint of decency, others don't. And might I add, Engadget's is quite clean, click down and it's even worse.

Facebook, e.g., has large amounts of text and divs and tabs, but fewer images. This is "news feed" page, no scrolling down. Grows worse after a while.

Now.

What with triparound and lags, each object takes a while to get where it needs to be, plus redirects, so it's not a direct correlation, but roughly speaking getting to Google and loading the first page of results is about 20 times faster than Engaget's first page - if we ignore the complexity and size of the page.

Each additional object needs time to be requested, so that kind of matters - 100 1K jpegs are slower to load than 1 100K JPEG. Let's see:

Google: 2 objects (2 png)
Facebook: 8 (avatars and stuff)
Yahoo: 19 (hm)
Engadget: 96

And that's why in low-ping conditions, like multiple routers, wifi, corner-of-network one is WAY slower than the other.

I may have picked on them, but E's page is not the worst. Some people just don't care any more, and browsers are slow, bandwidth is wasted, and RAM gets eaten at a phenomenal rate.

We can never have "desktop" experience until mobiles have 3GHz cores to take on that bathtub of ashes that is Flash, until RAM on devices doesn't go above 2G and until people stop adding stuff to pages until it gives out.

Which one do you think is going to be first?

Yeah. We need more RAM.