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Adobe Ends Development of Flash On Mobile Browsers
larry bagina writes "Jason Perlow of ZDNet is reporting that Adobe will stop developing Flash for mobile browsers and focus on AIR and HTML5 tools. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if 750 voices screamed out in terror and were laid off. But that noise was overshadowed by everybody else celebrating."
Just in time for the .xxx domains.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
My god... it's Steve Jobs laughing.
But.. but... now how will I get the "whole web" experience?!
Can't believe they would actually hold out until it was certain Steve Jobs couldn't say, "I told you so!"
Mobile being the future of the Web, it should also means the end of Flash on the desktop in a few years. Nobody's going to waste money doing Flash for the desktop and HTML5 for the mobiles, especially when the desktops can already do HTML5 too.
Applications done in Flash but compiled to Adobe Air is okay, just don't trash the Web with the stupid plug-ins.
Next step: agreeing on a CODEC for the HTML5 videos*. That's gonna be a fun topic!
* doesn't the tag allow for two source files? If it doesn't, it should!
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if 750 voices screamed out in terror and were laid off. But that noise was overshadowed by everybody else celebrating.
Seriously?? _THAT_ submission made it to the front page with _THAT_ tidbit?? There wasn't another submission that didn't make light of people losing their jobs?
Come on, Slashdot - I know you're trying to generate page views and whatnot to increase revenues but can we please stop being complete asses about it. Eventually you'll start driving people away which will DECREASE page views...
Seriously...
In the moment Apple chose not to include Flash support in the iPhone, Flash on mobile devices was doomed. The period between then and now was just the death throes.
Buuuurrrrnnnnnnn....
It is really nice that on my Asus Transformer, every website I've used just works. Compare that to my iPod touch and the iPad where I just get a big lego piece.
Until all websites stop using Flash, this sucks.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
People on Slashdot keep insisting that it works great! All they have to do is wait forever to wait for it to load and be very careful where they click and it hardly ever crashes, why would they ever discontinue it?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
standard is ruthlessly cut down in its prime by an evil corporation pushing open standards.
Yes, it does! Hurray! - Dr. Zoidberg
This description from Wikipedia makes it sound like they're just moving Flash into a bigger container.
Adobe Integrated Runtime, also known as Adobe AIR, is a cross-platform runtime environment developed by Adobe Systems for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, and Ajax, that can be run as desktop applications or on mobile devices.
Why does everyone think that HTML5 is the answer when even desktop browsers can't get it uniformly implemented? Mobile browsers are still mostly shit from a compliance and capability perspective compared to the desktop browsers that still can't get it right. Not sure where all this pie in the sky idealism comes from
And that, my friends, is why you don't hinge your product's "competitive advantage" on somebody else's tech if you can avoid it. A lot of Android tablet makers touted Flash compatibility as a key reason to buy their wares instead of an iOS device even though mobile Flash was always buggy. They were so desperate to get in the tablet game that they latched on to Adobe's buggy tech and prayed Adobe would someday work out the kinks. Now what do they have? Adobe just screwed them all in one move, making Jobs looks like a prophetic visionary and Apple's competitors like desperate idiots.
"Why should I buy this instead of an iPad?" Flash was always a weak answer to that question at best and now Apple's competitors don't even have that.
My friend sent me an email yesterday: "I'm about to go into a meeting where Adobe is laying off my whole team." He had worked on Flash for many years since Macromedia owned the project. After the meeting he said, "Just got out of meeting, I have a job until April 20, paid thru May 15, decent severance, but job will end."
I feel sorry for the creators of all the flash content, but OTOH, they should have thought better when they chose that platform in the first place.
The next closed platform to tackle, iOS?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
You are not supposed to use a browser on an Apple device. You have to download an app for every webpage you want to visit.
Everybody knew eventually this was going to happen. Adobe started transitioning to HTML5 years ago. Clearly they aren't there yet, but this is proof that progress is being made. (finally! the end of flash is not near, but it's certainly coming!)
It's almost 2012, I think Adobe is doing this at the right time now that most browsers are starting to be fairly HTML5-complete (as complete as HTML5 itself is, which is not _that_ much).
I know many now think "Steve Jobs was right!". Well, I don't think it took a genius to know that this was coming, Adobe has been preparing for it ever since HTML5 started going big (thanks to Apple and Google, among many others). I would not say this is Adobe "finally giving in" to Steve, because Adobe has never really opposed HTML5 AFAIK. Flash has always been complementary to stuff the web was not ready for; even if we hate flash that's why it existed. Now its 2012, not 2007, and most people are ready to go HTML5 and definitely drop flash (wide browser support, more mature spec, somewhat consistent across browsers, etc.. at least compared to 2007).
Oh great, now there is no easy way to block all the bloat of surfing the internet. These were truly the glory days when ad block + flash block created a nice browsing experience. We will soon be subject to every ones personal animation framework; coded in fancy html5 with loads of hacks to get it to work on each browser, no easy way to block it and helpfully running at 99% cpu util.
Everyone hates flash and would like to see it removed from the browser. And suddenly it was all Jobs' idea?
I wish they would stop development of their Crashplayer everywhere... especially on Linux...
I dream how YouTube will stop using that piece of shit... and go for 100% WebM and let IE suck on a WebM plugin..
Soon enough... soon enough..
I'm hoping that someone will release an HTML5 tool that provides Artists the same capabilities that Flash did. I don't really care about the Flash platform, but the Flash tool has a large community of Artists that have built up a lot of expertise with it.
I don't want to move off Flash until my Artist actually has something to move to. I'm sure Adobe is working on something, but I'd prefer an open source solution (not because of money).
You sound like a very small and insignificant person to have a chip that big on your shoulder.
"Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people."
Eleanor Roosevelt
Mobile is only one problem area. Flash has unexpectedly quits on wake from sleep on my MBPro.
How many years have these problems been going on?
So, it is no secret Apple devices don't do flash and yet you bought two... way to go on voting with your dollars.
Buying TWO devices whose user experience you claim sucks. Please tell me you are not allowed to vote. Ever!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Next step: agreeing on a CODEC for the HTML5 videos
To support iOS devices you need to support h.264.
Thus supporting any other formats mean extra, needless work.
Pretty much any site on the web today tat supports video has already transcoded to h.264.
Hello, de-facto standard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
they finally realized flash is shit and hopeless, after trying it on android.
I'm just thinking of all the ways I can break the news to the "web developers" working in east london offices painted a plethora of shades of white (with a suspiciously vibrant green fern) and insist there is more difference between their mac pro and my intel based workstation than a piece of fruit, that they can no longer list ActionScript as their primary programming language!
Plenty of fun ways but none lacking in cruelty :)
While the video aspect of it seems a no brainer, I'm not following how the apps will work.
Supposedly you can translate from flash to air in which case it becomes a locally installed app.
My question is how will the facebooks of the world like this? You no longer need their website, you just run the app. I can't see this very good for them as far as revenue from ads/hits, etc. And how is this supposed to jive with apple's vision of the world where everything must be done via iTunes? I can't see them changing their tune. Again, if you need to grab all these from iTunes and not directly from the website you are on where is the incentive for Facebook to continue deploying more apps?
I must be missing something.
Adobe is being stupid. I use flash on mobile every day, most of the day. Very stupid move Adobe.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Long before Flash supported compressed video, it supported keyframe-based vector animations. Which of those HTML 5 codecs is vector animation? Is there a standard way to author animations for SVG or canvas yet? (Adobe Edge is still a preview.)
To support iOS devices you need to support h.264.
Web sites in some situations must pay a royalty for each H.264 stream. If they can switch as many clients as possible to WebM, they can deduct WebM plays from their "related revenue" as defined by MPEG-LA. Ideally, such a web site could serve H.264 to iOS and Windows Phone 7 and WebM to everything else.
Are we finally getting rid of Flash, and Silverlight... The day would be even better if Google announced giving up with NaCl.
Presumably the aren't maintaining their ARM port. What dose this mean for their Windows 8 support?
The same users who insisted on IE 6 in the enterprise and our 50+ year old parents, now use IE 8 or will upgrade to it very soon.
IE 8 which has no html 5 will dominate the web until 2019 as these users refuse to upgrade and love the blue E, and have no idea what html is sadly. Until such users make less than 10% of the marketshre you still need to support html 4, css 2, and flash. You do not want to turn away 1 out of 10 customers would you?
I pray earnestly, that MS will make Windows 7 SP 2 come with IE 10 next summer. Or at least IE 9 which does have some HTML 5 support, siniliar to WinXP sp 3 included IE 8. IE 6 did not start dying off until the SP automatically updated the browser on the cdrom. Otherwise these users will never upgrade past IE 8 and hold us all hostage to outdated technology.
http://saveie6.com/
Funny, plan9 had it about a decade earlier, and it didn't save them. Well, not directly. At the current rate of adoption, osx, linux, bsd, ... will have adopted the rest of plan9's ideas.
When Apple said "no" to Adobe, I thought it was a pissing contest. I thought Adobe would get it figured out. Like when every printer manufacturer was told by Apple to write their interface drivers to Apple's specification or be ignored; now it's an assumed industry requirement standard for all platforms. Adobe says is can't make it work. My cynical self says, "I have no pity for outsourcing oneself into oblivion, like HP has." One would think that given all this time, Adobe would have converted its Flex source code to C++, and tuned it; obvious enough. This could actually be of some good; one idea comes to mind is to use this as a business school case study of what happens when a business listens to only to Wall Street, and ignoring Main Street. Last year when I got wind of this Apple-Adobe contest, and the way Adobe was crapping on Linux Developers, and that the Canvas Tag in HTML5 had been embraced by IE9; the handwriting was on the wall. I've seen many dynasties born, rise, and fall; it's painfully obvious, Adobe is at Apogee.
From my office, the Universe is this. Adobe's Dream Weaver product is a far second to Eclipse. Adobe's Flex/Flash product won't let Photoshop, and Illustrator file formats be embedded into Flash, I can't figure out why. The industry is moving to the Tablet, and Phone. Flash has less to offer than HTML5. And I don't need Adobe to create using HTML5, simple economics can be applied here. Adobe has had a fine run, I'm reminded of the statement by a grateful spider, "good bye, friend of Flash."
I hope adobe finds a way to keep actionscript 3 and make it compatible with HTML 5 concepts. I feel like AS3 is pretty much what javascript should be.
Maybe they can hand Flash to the open source community and let people continue to adapt it to new hardware, etc. Maybe Flash has its flaws, but for at least the next few years it's still necessary. They're not going to convert all those websites that rely on Flash to HTML5 overnight.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
This news saddens me. For more than a decade Flash has been *the* ubiquitous end-user rich-client cross-platform environment. Whereever Java initially wanted to go, Flash was already there.
However, the botch-jobs Macromedia and then Adobe delivered when it came to fixing basic issues and bugs in the Flash are beyond comprehension. Font-rendering and compiling has had the same serious bugs and troubles ever since 2001, right to the point were HTML5/CSS3 Font integration hasn't only caught up but superseded Flash-based Font integration. It peaked in what can only be called a flat-out scam by Adobe, when they introduced Flash 8 IDEs 'justify' option for textfields - which would lose it's justified layout as soon as you'd change the default text dynamically. The slowpoking with HW-accelerated 3D - it basically still is a beta, if at all - is beyond any measure. Unity3D has taken the helm in that department, and they aren't letting it up it appears. Flash simply lost out in that area aswell. At last the Flash Pipeline totally missed out the touch-based UI craze which it easily could have jumped ahead of to lead the way into a future of sleek touch-based UIs. Flash is made for this sort of thing, yet it hasn't even entered a beta phase regarding this. Like I said: Nothing but a series of large-type epic fuckups.
Even with modern HTML5/CSS3/Ajax/JavaScript being pretty much cross-platform without to many workaround hacks, it is still a bloated mess of a historically grown stack of intermangled technologies and paradigms that doesn't even come near the capabilities of a Flash/AS3 based enviroment. It's even basically half a decade behind of what pure Browser-based solutions could be simply due to the browserwars back in the early 200x'ses.
Flash could've had it all and even pushed back Java into the most obscure pure-business related stuff - but I guess after the one glimpse of light with the introduction of AS2 it was all downhill from then on.
Sad. Very sad. I hope they finally GPL the whole damn thing. Maybe the FOSS community can save the day with a usable AS3 - VectorGFX VM. But I'm not holding my breath.
It's a tradegy to see Flash go this way, but I guess it's time to move along, bite the bullet and stark messing around with bizar DOM-based rich-client programming. Great. Just great. Just the thought of that gives me the creeps.
Well done, Adobe. I hope your rich-client operations die of allready, you're obviously not competent enought to handle them, no matter how advanced the technology you have at hand is. Not only did Steve Jobs see how well Webkit HTML5 did, he also saw how uninspired your handling of Flash was. The iPad didn't kill Flash, at least not alone, Adobes incompetence had a measurable part in that aswell.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yeah, in this crowd that's not radical buy by god I'll be glad to see that thing disappear. I'd be happier if I could get in a Delorean, spark up 1.21 gigawatts of power and make it happen 10 years ago.
It's almost like betting on the sun rise happening but you fanbois will go around making him sound like a prophet for predicting the end of a technology that already had a standardized replacement in place with growing adoption.
What the hell are you on about? I recognize your right to be an overly sensitive pinhead, but I feel l must protest. All I did was make a joke about Adobe's timing and the little war they had. I note that some others actually got it.
A long long time ago in a (MacWorld) Convention far far away, I visited this booth by a little company called "FutureWave software".
They had this product that I had been thinking about: rather than sending bulky (and coarse) bitmaps over our state-of-the-art 56K modems, why not just send vector graphics? It was like the difference between Illustrator and Photoshop. Maybe you could even use vector graphics to do animation that wouldn't tie up huge amounts of bandwidth on this thing called the "Internet".
Anyway, since my imagination far far outstripped my coding ability, I had no chance to do this on my own (and I was, and still am, lazy as shit. To the do'ers in the world go the rewards I guess). Still I knew a winner when I saw one. I promptly signed up for a pre-release copy of software (as I did for CoSA After Effects and Electric Image). I think I got a single digit serial number.
Of course, what I REALLY should've had done was to ask if they needed some investors. Even though I didn't have a lot of money, maybe they would've taken pity on me and given me a few token shares (or offered me a job like CoSA did wrangling Macs). Then, when they got bought by Adobe I would have been rich(er)! Ah well, the young are stupid. (I finally started thinking of innovative software companies as potential investment targets when I came across Silicon Color.)
I guess nowadays whenever someone comes up with potentially game-changing ideas, news gets out fast and the Vulture Capitalists (just kidding a little) jump on it quickly. Note Gruopon's $12B valuation. Life was simpler and more innocent back then.
While I am not the biggest fan of it's proprietary nature or bugginess, flash has one big feature that makes developing for it a LOT better than html5: ActionsScript 3. It's based on what ecmascript 4 would have been, and is a true strongly typed class-based object oriented language with first-class functions. It's a really nice language to develop in, actually. Especially compared to javascript. Fuck javascript. Fuck it right in its almost-untyped, prototype-based ass. And I say that as someone that develops in javascript every day.
------- Driver carries less than 64K of cache.
I think the real issue is far more hideous. With the likes of Apple (and now Microsoft) saying "No plugins". It was becoming clear only native apps were going to be allowed in the playground.
While many rejoice. See a closed proprietary system is in the death thralls. I caution you not to rejoice. But to contemplate what's really going on.
Apple made a closed system that allowed all profits to funnel through it. And not a peep out of the Dept. of Justice on such anti-competitive practices.
So Microsoft said, "Hey, let's do the same with Windows 8."
Adobe just merely read the writing on the wall. Such anti-competitive behaviors are going to be allowed. A user who purchases a computer will be told by the manufacturer what software they run on their own property.
Adobe doesn't make money on Flash. It costs them a small fortune. They make it on the tools they sell. And well, they're just going to do more with their tools outputting native and HTML5.
In the end....it's the consumers who lose. Less choice. Few alternatives. And it's a pay-to-play(ground).
All apps must be approved by Apple. All developers must share a 1/3 of their profits with Apple. Is it ANY wonder Apple exceeded even Exxon-Mobil?
There's an app for that. But you can't install it unless we approve and get a lion's share. How does this world look for developers?
$1
Apple takes 30 cents.
Gov. take 30 cents.
Developer is left with 40 cents to cover overhead and all.
This, on the heels of the accouncement of that MS is discontinuing Silverlight development as well. Seems like a bad business decision on the part of both companies. I realize that HTLM5 is intended to take the place of them both, but being a .net developer I can say from experience that HTML 5 is a lot more frustrating to code and debug... more than silverlight at least cant really speak for Flash. My point is, there is a place for both and with the only two big players jumping ship its going to be hard for developers that have already learned Flash or Silverlight, to just switch gears and starting mucking around in JavaScript again.
What about the Chumby? It relies on mobile Flash.
Kriston
Sadly, whenever a profitable platform is shut down, a lot of good developers are RIF'ed. Its a horrible market right now, so PLEASE look for a way to stay with Adobe.
1) Use your knowledge of internal procedures and development practices WORK for you (saves the company serious $$$s training somebody new!)
2) Submit your resume back to your own HR department and let them know you wish to stay
3) Work off-hours on active projects that YOU think have potential - ask questions, involve yourself in debugging, development and design reviews
4) Get yourself invited to development meetings while still putting 40 hrs/wk on your current tasks
5) Don't Slouch - its bad for your posture
The last two items really get the line managers' attention.
Flash has two primary failings (designed for mouse, and compatibilty loss,) which is is why it doesn't work on:
- Mobile phones without a "mouse"
- Touch devices without a "mouse"
- Console game devices without a "mouse"
- Underpowered CPU devices (think smartphones without 1080p video, and handheld game consoles prior to the 3DS)
- Screen resolution over 480p
- Framerates over 30fps
Flash's failings:
- Pointer optimized, So you need a mouse, or something that mimics the constant movement of a mouse (eg Wiimote)
- Webplugin optimized, try using flash on a PS3, it's terrible. Try it on Android, Terrible. Try it on the Wii, it works as long as you only use one button. You can't make a flash game "Good" on a Wii, and it's unusable on all mobile devices.
- Video decoder written in software (FATAL.)
- No forward compatibility, or at least not any more.
Lets roll back the clock for a minute to see how we can save flash from itself.
Adobe has been adding feature bloat to the Flash Authoring tool, back when it was a good-enough animation tool (since been superseded by tools like ToonBoom)
Adobe kicked off the "video streaming" by relegating the flash player to being nothing but a dumb video player, ignoring it's primary purpose - small vector graphics animation.
Once Adobe put h264 video in it, it's fate was sealed, everyone started producing h264 video content and then the browsers added better software or hardware support without needing the player, particuarly in mobile devices.
So what do you need flash for anymore? You don't need it anymore except for it's originally designed purpose - small vector animation.
So Adobe could save the remains of flash by having the vector animation component integrated into the h264 standard. We currently lack both a 2D and 3D vector playback format that can be treated like video. Forget the flash games, those are done and being replaced with html5 games or ipad/android games that can be integrated with the AIR runtime. Games designed for the desktop, should stay on the desktop and be specifically designed and targeted for mobile touch screens, not try to be "flash everywhere." The last time flash worked "everywhere" was version 7. After that point Mobile devices could no longer play flash, and desktops couldn't keep up with larger screens without increasing CPU speed.
What we need is, basically to define lossless "vector keyframe" and "vector delta frame" along with a "bitmap keyframe" and "bitmap delta frame." MNG didn't take off because it was a bloated problem that tried to be bitmapped flash. Forward compatibility using the mpeg family containers makes more sense, because one of the key problems with large flash files is that they lose sync. I mean like right now in order to make a 3MB swf file a 1080p video on youtube you have to dump all the frames into 1080p frames which consumes something like 100GB without using ZMBV (or about 3GB with it) and then upload it to Youtube which compresses it to like 100MB.
Flash, as a solution to play video is dead. The only reason Youtube employs it, is for ads.
RAR predates zlib and is very popular in circles you mention above but zlib is built into web browsers and is here to stay. Such issues aren't settled in just one place - give it time and we'll see what happens. Sometimes you end up with both...
it still means you're out of a job during a recession... in fact, in order to collect that you have to not get another job before the money runs out.
First there was Flash video over RTMP, then there was Adobe HTTP Dynamic streaming (HDS). Both of these were ADAPTIVE streaming technologies, and extremely popular an widley used. Moreso RTMP, but HDS is starting to gain adoption.
HTML-5 does not provide any method for any kind of adaptive bitrate, or fragmented video delivery. It is strictly PROGRESSIVE download - i.e. download the whole file, and play it. There are a billion problems with this. No adaptive bitrate (downgrade video quality if you cannot meet the sustained bitrate), and difficulty in caching (caching one giant file very difficult for a reactive, real-time cache, as opposed to caching smalller HDS or HLS "fragments"). The only other really "competitor" would be Apples HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) - which is the standard for iOS devices, and starting to gain adoption on Set-Top Box-devices, but pretty invisible on the desktop space.
So...my question is... "What about video!?"
Every time Firefox crashed on my desktop, it was Flash. Every time FF hung for long periods of time before coming back out of it and acting like everything was normal like some cracked-out epileptic, (apologies to epilepsy-sufferers), it was Flash. And to top it all off, I can't imagine the number of times I've read the words "your version of Flash is out of date". I am so glad I won't be forced to put that crap on my phone, and I'll be glad when it's dead on the desktop too. I'll be the first one to buy tickets to the dance party on its grave. Good riddance!
Steve Jobs created tens of thousands of jobs.
I know a lot of anti-Apple fanboys couldn't admit it but it's shit on Android because Flash is just going to be shit on a mobile device, imo. I never used it because it was shit so it's not big loss.
morons like me are happy with that answer
Sixth, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
It is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Same reason why Java on the desktop never took off. Developers could only program for the lowest common denominator and never take advantage of unique hardware capabilities.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Microsoft pushes home users to the latest IE as aggressively as they can really get away with. Legacy IE support has become a substantial cost for them.
Meanwhile, app virtualization is just starting to unfreeze the glacial flow of upgrades at large companies. The big cost of a broswer upgrade today is that all of your images have to be refreshed (and tested), which is a huge expense for a 100K+ desktop shop. But we're seeing the very beginnings of app virtualization, which will eliminate the whole idea of "blessed images" at large shops (because each application is entirly self-contained, so you don't have to test for conflicts). It will be a slow change of course, but it's inevitable given the cost savings and will evenually be the doom of back-version software in the enterprise (except for IE6 for thos legacy intranet sites, that sucker will be around when the Sun explodes).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Programmers use what they know. I've seen plenty of things that are in ActiveX (UI's for Cisco network equipment, for example) in situations where the target audience may very well not be windows users.
I've seen some *horrible* abuse of java.
But programmers use what they know, or what's popular. This lends to a bit of a cycle, but eventually may break down as a newer language moves up.
Jobs always angled for "exclusivity" relationships with his developers. Adobe broke ranks before Microsoft bailed Apple out in 1997 and Jobs may have been out for revenge. With Apple saying "no" and Microsoft saying "silverlight" and Linux saying "your plugin doesn't work with my system" ... Adobe has few friends.
wtf
Since when has Jobs angled for exclusivity? Since when was Adobe exclusively Apple? Ever?
You might remember the whole NeXT thingamajob. You know, the company Jobs was at between 1985 and late 1996. NeXT's graphics were based on Postscript. Adobe was never exclusive with Apple, or NeXT, or anyone. Adobe didn't "break ranks" in the sense you imply because they hadn't ever been exclusively Apple. Even the products most associated with the Mac, like Photoshop, had been crossplatform for ages (first non-Mac version of PS shipped in 1992!).
Start making sense, man
Wow, that must be the most insightful, unbiased post I've read on Slashdot in a long time. The usual black and white thinking I see on here is so immature.
Please Please Please Adobe, Do No Kill Flash
Sure I hate it. It is the engine of all the blinking, spinning, annoying bits of noise on web pages everywhere. If you kill Flash, then these bubbly bits of crap will be implemented by the intrinsic features of every browser. I use ClickToFlash to keep these naughty bits of the web in their place. How will I suppress the noise?
Please continue to support Flash so I have an easy way of turning the crap off.
The fictional war between Flash and HTML5 isn't Flash vs HTML5, it's "Do we allow plug-ins in the browser?" which is a totally different question and affects Java Applets and hundreds of other plug-ins as well.
In my eyes there is no war, there are only heavily invested corporate factions that wish to create a war to prevent competition and they're trying to leverage the open source community to do their bidding by promoting a fictional standard, and only partially supporting it. It gives them the opportunity to fork it before it's even a standard (yes we've been through this before with Microsoft/Apple)
The IE team said that they will not support WebGL because of "potential driver issues" which is basically a way of saying that we don't trust the quality of the drivers written on our systems. Other implementations such as mobile Safari are hindered as well by the lack of plug-in support. These companies know that web apps will eventually take over what the desktop app is, and they want to control it.
I agree that something will come out that is a competitor to Flash, and probably in the next 5 years, but if it isn't HTML5, then it's probably a plug-in. As far as the immediate present (where most products are made) there is no substitute for Flash.
Then, there are all the clueless users, who want to upgrade their PCs, because the old one has become "Too Slow(tm)". ...which, most of the time, doesn't mean that the machine can't handle modern software's workload. It only means that the machine is so much ridden with viruses, spyware and other malware, that few cycle are left for legitimate work.
Among all reasons for upgrade, there are all these which could be averted, had the user received better help or had the user used correct anti-malware tools.
On the other hand, these clueless users are the source which provide us geeks with a constant flow of only 2-years old (and still plenty functionnal) hardware that we can revive, pending a good software-scrubing or Linux installation.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... because people believe flash = video - though it ain't so. While HTML-5 is nice and dandy, it's the consumer's choice. Flash, like Java, enables browser based plugins to deliver more. We are using flash and Java for client-side encryption, large file uploading, video and audio conferencing. Every option taking from the markets limits the choices we, as developers, have to deliver solutions. So - I am not celebrating. I personally don't like flash that much. But it was a tool in my box which is no longer available. mm.
You probably go on strange web sites.
For me, with a simple adblock+ and a correct broser, the web pages are fast like hell. PErhaps a little script blocker could help to remove the remaining non-ad clutter ?
aaaaaaa
What stake do you have in it? Your opinions seem pretty intense for someone who just follows the status quo.
I don't like Flash (mostly because of its non-free nature), but paradoxically, I worry what would happen when it dies.
Currently, ALL the annoying ads are in Flash. So I just block Flash with FlashBlock (and click on the Flash objects that I want to see, which are usually embedded videos). That makes the web very tolerable for me.
What will I do when Flash dies, and everyone moves to HTML5 ads? Will it be easy to block them as well? I suspect it'll be much easier for publishers to make it hard-to-block ads, now when it's all in the HTML.
hemi
NoScript and/or AdBlock the <canvas> element (and write exceptions for the scripts/canvas elements you want to see). You're welcome.
.. Yes, Flash is kind of bloated and slow.
But, oh boy, it will be NOTHING compared to the JavaScript-based frameworks to do the same things Flash does now on HTML5 canvasses.
Removing slow native functionality can be a decent idea, but replacing it with the same functionality but running through an interpreter isn't likely to fix anything..
Then please allow me to rephrase with different verb tenses: If there is no Flash today, in what format should new works in roughly the same style as Homestar Runner, Weebl and Bob, and the cartoons on Newgrounds be produced?
Hilarious, slashdot. All about the discussion... yeah...
*shakes head sadly*
Call me crazy, but Flash has been doing a damn fine job on my HTC Desire HD. Oh well, it's not as if this move will "change the mobile web" in the next 2 years.
I recall interviewing at Adobe once upon a time... to work on their new flash-mobile initiative ... the hiring manager kicked off the interviews by explaining what it was they were trying to achieve ... "so basically it's taking a big pile of shit and making it a smaller pile of shit..."