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Adobe Ends Development of Flash On Mobile Browsers

Posted by Unknown on from the gnash-developers-weep-over-wasted-time dept.

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."

70 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. OMG by masternerdguy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just in time for the .xxx domains.

    --
    To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
  2. Shhh... Listen... by Petersko · · Score: 5, Funny

    My god... it's Steve Jobs laughing.

    1. Re:Shhh... Listen... by iluvcapra · · Score: 2

      It seems to work well for everyone else.

      Everyone but Adobe.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
    2. Re:Shhh... Listen... by Random+BedHead+Ed · · Score: 2

      Good riddance to Flash. But you know, since we're on this topic, to all the "Steve Jobs was right" fanboys: you do not understand logic. Sorry, but you don't. (Note: the following rant is not directed at parent, who makes a parallel argument to the one Steve Jobs made, and is surely correct.)

      I think that letter from Steve, Thoughts on Flash, is a great way to test whether people understand logical arguments and are competent in keeping separate ideas straight in their heads. Those who see the letter as a definitive rebuttal against the use of Flash on the iPhone fail to do these things. I advise them to avoid both commenting, and voting.

      To distill the logic of letter, it basically said the following: Flash sucks. You should therefore not be allowed to use it on your own phone.

      Obviously it was more detailed than that, and went to great lengths to politely point out the many ways in which Flash sucks. Go ahead and read it - it's a great takedown of that wretched, ubiquitous plugin. Steve says that Flash goes against the idea of open standards on the web, that it's slow and a resource hog, that its development is way behind what market needs, and that it ran poorly on the iPhone when Apple evaluated it. All good points, and because I agree that Flash is a rotten piece of crap that should never have risen to prominence, I enjoyed reading them.

      But none of this directly implies that you should not be allowed to install it on your own phone. Steve makes the case that Flash sucks, but at the end of the article a thinking person does not "better understand why [Apple] do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads." There is no logical connection to support that outcome, even if we emerge from the letter hating Flash more than ever. Again, his premises were spot-on, but his logic was broken, so he pulled a conclusion out of his butt and the masses lapped it up. And to those of you who ignore this sleight of hand and argue that Apple must do whatever it can to restore a sense of childlike wonder and superior design to humanity: shut up, you stupid fanboy zombies. Brains like yours are the reason we have the politicians we have.

    3. Re:Shhh... Listen... by zieroh · · Score: 2

      But more to the point, the logical connection is not that hard to fathom, and has even been stated as such on more than one occasion. The essence of Flash for most developers is an easy way to create something that works equally on all platforms. The flaw with that, of course, is that it leads quickly to a lowest-common-denominator situation where advanced features aren't widely taken advantage of. On top of that, access to those features is gated by Adobe, essentially putting a third party between Apple and any Flash developers that actually wanted to take advantage of the advanced features the iPhone possessed.

      The logical connection, if you really need it spelled out, is that access to a "good enough" development platform that works (i.e. Flash) is often a barrier to the adoption of a great development platform. By banning Flash from the iPhone, it forced a large (and fairly successful) development community to come into existence out of seemingly nowhere.

      Put another way, Apple didn't want Flash to become the de facto development environment of the iPhone. Doing so would have placed Apple at a competitive disadvantage, with Adobe in charge. The fact that Apple acted in its own best interests shouldn't really be surprising.

      --
      People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
    4. Re:Shhh... Listen... by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2

      Actually Adobe has itself has been somewhat problematic for Apple. When Apple announced their development platforms of of OS X: Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa, it laid out the intended usage. Classic was a bridge between 9 and OS X. Carbon would be an intermediate but Cocoa was the future. While Carbon could be used in the upcoming years, everyone should move towards Cocoa. I remember Steve Jobs laying this out. Adobe coded their applications like Photoshop in Carbon and you can still code in it; however, advanced objects like 64-bit are done in Cocoa. Apple toyed with the idea of 64-bit Carbon but realized only a handful of developers would need it, namely Adobe. And they needed it because they didn't want to port to Cocoa. That's why Jobs called them lazy because they dragged their feet for years instead of following the roadmap that had been laid out.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    5. Re:Shhh... Listen... by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 2

      err, logic?

      Steve Jobs' point was that they didn't support flash on the iPhone because it it was a giant stinker. He supported his reasoning with evidence.

      Steve's not saying YOU can't have it on your phone, and if you want a phone with flash on it, go buy someone else's.

      If you want plugins for your mobile browser, dont' use an iPhone. If you do, get an Android, or some other device that supports the feature you want.

      You're chastising apple for not including a feature they didn't want to have in their product in the first place. How is this a failure of logic in relation to Steve's letter on flash?

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    6. Re:Shhh... Listen... by Mr+Bubble · · Score: 2

      No, his logic was that it would suck the battery and resources out of the iPads and provide a bad touch experience - both of which would have reflected poorly on the product and on Apple had the customers installed it.

      The public is not really tech savvy and would have installed it on their IOS devices and blamed Apple for the resulting security, usability, and performance degradations. Developers wouldn't have had a reason to use HTML5 and Adobe wouldn't have caved and thrown in with HTML5. Seems pretty logical to me. Choices like not using Flash are what made the iPad so useable and so different from all the other tablets that didn't sell worth a shit.

      Also, let us not forget that, for all that time people bitched about Apple not having Flash, it was not available even for Android anyway. There was no product.

      --
      "The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
  3. The Whole Web by gwking · · Score: 5, Funny

    But.. but... now how will I get the "whole web" experience?!

    1. Re:The Whole Web by bberens · · Score: 4, Informative

      Easy, you'll use the most recent version of the flash player on your Android device for the next 5 years or so while people migrate.

      --
      Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
    2. Re:The Whole Web by xaxa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Easy, you'll use the most recent version of the flash player on your Android device for the next 5 years or so while people migrate.

      I won't. The "built in" Flash on my HTC Desire keeps trying to update itself to the latest version via the Android Market, which uses the last few MB of space I have for apps. The only way I've found to prevent this happening is to "Clear Data" for the Market app -- deselecting the "Update automatically" box for Flash doesn't make any difference.

      This annoys me greatly. It's supposed to be my device, HTC. (I would remove Flash completely if I could. I don't ever seem to visit websites that need Flash on my phone.)

    3. Re:The Whole Web by amRadioHed · · Score: 2

      Move flash to the SD card. Flash on my N1 only takes up 72KB.

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    4. Re:The Whole Web by amRadioHed · · Score: 4, Informative

      Adobe never enabled it for Flash for some reason which I can't understand, but you can force it (and many other large apps) to SD by using an ADB command. Not all apps work from SD, but Flash works perfectly.

      Leaving this option set can cause problems since you can't or don't want some apps moved to SD, so I just enable it temporarily when I have an app to move, then disable it again after by setting the option back to "0". Once the app is forced to SD it will stay there when it's updated in the future.

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    5. Re:The Whole Web by jc79 · · Score: 2

      If you want it to be your device, root your phone using Revolutionary. Install Titanium Backup. Use it to move updates to system apps into the ROM so you get more space for user apps.

      Or go the whole hog and put CyanogenMod 7 on there. With S2E you can use a partition on your SD card as an extension of the /system filesystem and never run out of space for apps again. Other advantages of CM7 on Desire are increased battery life and control over how apps communicate ("Phone goggles"). The main disadvantage is the lack of HTC Sense and the integration between Sense apps, although for me that wasn't a particularly painful thing to lose. Other custom ROMs are available.

  4. Rather Petty, Adobe... by Petersko · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can't believe they would actually hold out until it was certain Steve Jobs couldn't say, "I told you so!"

    1. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      What innovation? I have YET to see an HTML V5 site that didn't suck! I can watch full screen SD video even on this 1.8GHz Sempron I use as a nettop with NO GPU acceleration and it plays just fine, no skips no stutters. I try to play any site bragging about HTML V5 and even on my brand new dual core netbook its beats the CPU like a pimp dealing with a bitch late with his money. Of course it also looks like the video tag (which is all it is you know, its up to the browsers to decide what it means and Apple and MSFT have already said won't be Theora or WebM, seeing as how they both want to "fucking kill Google") will end up being H.264 so it will be just as damned proprietary as flash, so no gains there either.

      So what do we gain? we get a "solution" that uses more resources than the one we had, is just as proprietary if not more so that the one we had, and which will mean many more machines that can play the original solution won't be able to play the new and will have to be shitcanned. You guys SERIOUSLY call this progress? Are you sure you don't work for Oracle or MSFT?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 2

      Actually, I would bet that they, like Microsoft, have tons of competent programmers, but no competent management.

      You'd be amazed at how much damage management can do.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
    3. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by HarrySquatter · · Score: 2

      I hate to break it to you but despite what you claim the flash video player is using gpu acceleration for scaling and colorspace conversion at minimum. On the other hand, the html5 player is most likely doing everthing in software hence the heavier cpu usage and less smooth playback.

    4. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by HarrySquatter · · Score: 2

      Sure as long as we ignore the fact that that "standardized replacement" was born largely from webkit proprietary extensions developed by Apple (canvas being a huge one)

    5. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by dbkluck · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Steve Jobs can't say "I told you so," all Android users knew he was right (or should have, anyway): flash is crap and we wish the web would switch to something better. But we're not going to be the ones to cut of our noses to spite our faces by going without flash while it is still so pervasive on the web. Steve and his devoted market segment are making the sacrifice for us, and at the same time driving content providers away from flash while I get to enjoy the convenience of still being able to use the flash content from websites who haven't switched. I have nothing but gratitude for that. I'd never buy an Apple product, I don't agree with the man's business practices, and I think the godlike homage he's gotten in the past few weeks since his death unfairly ascribes to him a lot of technical knowledge more properly attributable to the Woz. But credit where credit is due, he repeatedly had the balls to say "this is an outdated technology, we're switching to something better, backward compatibility be damned. Our users will follow us through the rough transition and be glad of it." See OS9, the floppy drive, the PS/2 keyboard and mouse, and soon, hopefully, Flash.

    6. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by jones_supa · · Score: 2

      Oh, why can't the web players (either Flash or HTML5) just throw the material on an YUV overlay like in the old days. If someone here wants to observe how much CPU is minimally needed, please grab some videos using youtube-dl and put them playing in mplayer.

    7. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You would be wrong. They may have SOME competent programmers, but they are a tiny minority at best.

      Adobe's products will not run on case sensitive file systems.

      NO amount of mismanagement can cause that. You can not end up in that situation with out actively doing things that are undeniably considered bad practice by anyone with half of a clue.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    8. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by afabbro · · Score: 2

      Adobe's products will not run on case sensitive file systems.

      I thought surely this must be hyperbole, but no.

      --
      Advice: on VPS providers
    9. Re:Rather Petty, Adobe... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Android vendors can't even be bothered pushing the latest version of the OS to their customers, you think they're going to spend time making sure a dead technology works ?

      Yes, because their customers want it. Plus they don't actually have to do anything to support it, that is all down to Google, and historically they have been excellent when it comes to maintaining browser APIs.

      The whole "You can just compile Android from source. Oh nvm, we're not going to give you the latest sources" thing.

      We shall see when ICS source is available. I was thinking more along the lines of "at least they try to provide source and don't lock out anything and everything they don't approve of, and it costs nothing to write and publish apps for and is compatible with all open source licenses", but okay I'll give you Android 3 is not fully open source.

      "You can hack applications!" Developers are just going to love that argument.

      So? "You can copy CDs!" Music labels are going to love that argument. The right to own a thing, the right to do what you want with it is important to me. More over screwing your customers to keep developers happy is not a business model I wish to promote or encourage. And yeah, there are plenty of Android developers and plenty of good apps, and while there might not be 1,000 versions of a cracked screen or fart noise generator I think I can live with it.

      "You can install the latest unstable develoment versions!" Because that's the feature that has drawn the multitudes to desktop Linux.

      Who said anything about unstable or development versions? 2.3 is a full retail release, nice and stable. It is interesting that you mention Linux because a lot of people here got pretty upset when it looked like OEMs might lock out non-Microsoft operating systems by requiring the bootloader to be cryptographically signed. I'll decide what I run on my hardware, thanks.

      The ultimate Android argument: it's better because a team of volunteers has to spend their time hacking it into an actual non-sucking version which the customer then ultimately has to support themselves instead of their phone manufacturer

      Try calling Apple to see if they will offer you some support for a 1998 Power PC Mac. See how useful it is as a general purpose computer these days. Then install Linux or a hacked MacOS update that bypasses the arbitrary lock-out on older systems and see how much better it is. Then appreciate that you saved a perfectly good computer from landfill and can maybe give it to someone who doesn't want to invest a lot of money in a new one.

      My friend is like that, he had a basic dumb Nokia but was interested in Android, just not willing to plump down the cash for a new phone or long term contract. Now he has a 1 month rolling contract SIM in an old but good phone which runs up to date software with excellent stability. HTC's support for shite anyway, especially since they apparently didn't update the manuals when the 2.1 update came around.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  5. At last! by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:At last! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Actually, A lot of corporations use flash for things like elearning and some of them are generations behind (like fp8 if you're lucky).

      HTML5? I still have to support IE8, sometimes even IE7 in my webapps.

      Try telling a fortune 500 company they should upgrade all their browsers to the latest IE. I have and its a pretty short conversation. They know the cost will be in the millions and they are more than happy to continue on using ancient technology.

    2. Re:At last! by grumbel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So long as you can get the absolute reference to the .flv you can download it,

      That's why a lot of flash is streamed these days, so you don't have a flv that you can just grab out of your Temp folder. If you know a way to easily and quickly download content directly from say http://www.thedailyshow.com/, let me know, last time I looked, there wasn't any working one on Linux.

      Add on to that the fact you can use FRAPS or most other Screen Recorders to capture the video should the stream be encrypted and it doesn't matter either way.

      That's complicated and cumbersome, as it it forces you to not use your computer in the mean time or it will run the video. It also forces you to download in real-time, which is the very thing you normally would want to avoid with a download.

      Flash is dominant in the video space because it got there first.

      Flash wasn't the first, ActiveX and Quicktime where much earlier. Flash won because it was the best and could do things that no other thing could do at the time. Even today HTML5 is still far away from being a fully working Flash replacement. Remember, Flash isn't just video, it's also a pretty damn good game development platform and animation toolkit.

      I fear that the only thing that will change with Flash gone is that webpages will switch to ever more obscure Javascript hacks to protect their content from manipulation. A Flash object can easily and comfortably be blocked with Flashbock, some Javascript hackery is far harder to handle.

    3. Re:At last! by Surt · · Score: 2

      It's funny, but he is right. Desktop and laptop sales are already in decline. It's gonna be all virtualization on dense servers and thin clients, just like Sun thought (but about a decade late to save them).

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    4. Re:At last! by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Y'all wanna know why desktops and laptops are in decline? I hate to break the news to ya but it ain't because everyone is using an iPad, it is because as we system builders that are still doing well in this economy can tell you for several years the PC has been "good enough" and there simply is no killer app that makes users need to switch!

      I have several customers who do their daily computing on what guys here would laugh at, late model P4s with a Gb of RAM and a couple hundred Gb HDD, but why should they switch? Webmail, FB, farmville, these things just don't slam even a 3.2Ghz P4 with HT, much less all those dual cores that have been sold since 06. hell my boys are both on hand me down Pentium Ds and when I offered to build them something bigger they were both "Uhhh...why? Our stuff works fine." all they do is surf and play MMOs and with both boxes having Radeon HD4850s everything just works fine.

      The problem is too many in the industry as well as my fellow system builders got used to the "MHz Wars" where everyone tossed every 3 years and which gave them constant churn and that just isn't the case anymore. Hell i always built myself a new PC every year and a half but my AMD quad is going on 3 years now and will probably last me another 5 or more, why should I switch? My games play just fine, I have 8Gb of RAM and 3Tb of space, and I can always slap in a replacement for my HD4850 or upgrade my CPU to a 6 core later on down the road if I need more power. But as it is all my games play at my screens native 1600x900 smooth, video transcoding is nice, everything "just works" and now that I finally replaced my old laptop for a dual core netbook I honestly can't see myself needing another PC for several years.

      So PCs aren't going anywhere, it is simply everybody has one. With cell phones folks chunk when the 2 year contract is up so that is creating churn and the tablets simply haven't be around long enough for everybody who wants one to have already bought one. I'm actually seeing quite good sales on the new AMD Brazos netbooks, I think the problem in that market is in the race to the bottom too many OEMs chose Atom without ION and that equals painful, but the Brazos has a nice Radeon built in and does full 1080P and plays WoW so everyone likes those. hell in my own family we have something like 7 desktop and 4 laptops, what would we do with more?

      The ones that survive are gonna be smart and doing value add like me. I show folks how they can organize and stream everything with an HTPC, how to make that late model P4 or early dual into a great PC media center for the kids, how to set up sharing networks so you can drag and drop between every machine in the house, how to have it all "just work" wirelessly. PCs aren't going anywhere, if anything everyone has so many of them now nobody knows what to do with them. the smart guys will be showing them how to get the most out of what they have.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    5. Re:At last! by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

      Not really. I don't know of anybody who has switched to a Mac recently. I bet most other people reading this thread don't either. But keep rollin' the astroturf, dood.

    6. Re:At last! by FireFury03 · · Score: 2

      You wouldn't. You'd write a word processor that resides native on the device and makes use of the local processing power, and tie its filestore to a service like dropbox, where the relatively small text document can be autosaved, and then available from any device with access to that dropbox store.

      So, uhm, how is that different to what we have now? Except for the fact that you're building remote file system drivers into the individual applications rather than the OS, which is moronic. We can already mount remote filesystems and save files to them, what you're suggesting is nothing new.

      I'm getting more and more tired of the push to "cloud computing" which perpetually seems to mean running things in your web browser. The original idea of "cloud computing" was that your PC is a thin client and the application is mostly on a remote server and is being displayed by your web browser. Then people realised that that was largely a bloody stupid idea (because network access is *not* ubiquitous!) and so now "cloud computing" seems to often involve having a local application running in your web browser. So the only difference between "cloud computing" and "regular computing" is that you're running everything inside a web browser, requiring orders of magnitude more resources to do what we've already been doing for years natively. The whole concept is idiotic.

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
  6. Really?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Really?! by bwintx · · Score: 2
      From TFA (the third one):

      approximately $70 million to $75 million related to employee severance arrangements

      ...which translates to an average of $100K per job. Granted, some folks get a lot and some don't; but in many companies, severance translates to a pittance if it happens at all. Just sayin'.

      --
      Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
    2. Re:Really?! by Canazza · · Score: 2

      750 people are losing their jobs. It says so in the article. Hell, it says so in the Summary. Albeit obtusely.

      --
      It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
    3. Re:Really?! by impaledsunset · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So you're worried more about certain people who would have to find new jobs rather than something that could potentially improve the Internet significantly for everyone? Would you rather we have a proprietary plugin like Flash as a defacto standard forever just to help them save their precious jobs? I'm not making light of people "losing" their jobs, I'm happy about it. And not because it is something good, but because it enables something good to happen.

  7. I'm not celebrating by nedwidek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  8. Multiple source files by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, it does! Hurray! - Dr. Zoidberg

  9. uh by bhcompy · · Score: 2

    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

  10. Laid off by rabenja · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

    1. Re:Laid off by rabenja · · Score: 3, Informative

      We are in the Minneapolis area where a tech recruiter friend of mine emailed me this morning regarding his layoff: "IT unemployment in the Twin Cities is currently at 1.7%, so most of our clients have to use us because they can't come close to finding/recruiting talent on their own." I do not think that my friend will have much trouble in this area.

    2. Re:Laid off by amicusNYCL · · Score: 5, Insightful

      He had worked on Flash for many years since Macromedia owned the project.

      Is he one of the people I can blame for the bugs from back then that still exist today? I kind of feel like a dick for saying it, but maybe if his team were better at their jobs then they would still have them.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    3. Re:Laid off by phorm · · Score: 2

      Who's responsible, the developer that doesn't fix a bug, or the manager that tells the developer "don't waste time working on that bug, work on *money gathering fancy feature X* instead"?

    4. Re:Laid off by amicusNYCL · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Do you write perfect bug-free code?

      Is that what I claimed?

      Do I have errors in my currently supported applications that were originally reported 8 years ago? No, I don't. You know what else I don't have? The resources of a $13 billion market cap, or 750 ex-programmers.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  11. You are doing it wrong by Hentes · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  12. Flash to HTML5 movement is not new to Adobe by Superken7 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

    1. Re:Flash to HTML5 movement is not new to Adobe by mr.dreadful · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "I don't think it took a genius to know that this was coming, "

      No, but it took huge balls at the time to say "we're not supporting this anymore. " Apple did the same thing with the 3.5" floppy disk and adopting the USB port on iMacs back in the day and got roundly mocked for it, until the PC makers started following suit a few years later. Whatever Jobs was, he was certainly a visionary. Apple was never afraid of break convention when they felt it was the right thing to do. What other companies can we say that about (seriously, what other PC manufacturers have down this? I'm genuinely curious.)

    2. Re:Flash to HTML5 movement is not new to Adobe by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2

      Really all Jobs did was publicly state what many thought about Flash. That seems rather typical of Jobs to tell someone to their face that their product sucks.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  13. Flash block by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Flash block by sootman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      True. Unfortunately, the problem was never that Flash was inherently evil--the problem was developers overusing it.

      I very much liked having all the bad kids in the "Flash" room and being able to close the door on that room with a Flash blocker. Now we're going to see a ton of badly-made sites with HTML5, and I don't think we'll ever see a "craptastic HTML5 blocker". :-( I'm already having a hard time with sites who think it's cool to cram a 100mb H.264 movie into a page.

      --
      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
  14. Flash is a Problem on My MacBook Pro by BoRegardless · · Score: 2

    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?

  15. So... you bought TWO devices you don't like? by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  16. There is already agreement by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:There is already agreement by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hello, de-facto standard.

      You know what's a good way of confirming this ? Go on your favorite torrent site and try to find some video encoded in WebM or Theora. You can't, it's all x264 and xvid and the x264 stuff is both higher quality and becoming ever more popular. It perfectly mirrors what happened with mp3, no way h.264 is going away. So why spend precious developer time in an ultra competitive industry building support for another codec that you'll just have to support on top of the de-facto standard for which you'll be paying and developing anyway ? That fight is over, geeks are just in denial.

      --
      If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
  17. Re:writing has been on wall by bonch · · Score: 2

    Yeah, not including support for a proprietary, third-party plug-in rife with performance issues and security vulnerabilities is definitely the same thing as pumping a new market with a free product funded by revenues from the monopoly product.

    Actually, no, it's not. Not at all.

  18. Re:First Post by HermMunster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  19. Re:writing has been on wall by MadKeithV · · Score: 2

    Yeah, not including support for a proprietary, third-party plug-in rife with performance issues and security vulnerabilities is definitely the same thing as pumping a new market with a free product funded by revenues from the monopoly product.

    Actually, no, it's not. Not at all.

    IMHO there's not that big a cognitive gap between using a position of power to bundle something to damage a competitor, or using that position of power to specifically disallow the competitor. The effect is the same.

    Also, for all its faults Flash is/was widely supported with relatively few hiccups, and for my particular purposes the hardware acceleration for 3D graphics in Flash 11 was a very big deal for cross-platform & mobile 3D.
    Now the only conclusion I can make is that the web will not be the platform for me in the medium-term future, and I think that's a shame.

  20. Re:Not so fast! by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    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/
  21. Flash is one sad long series of epic fuck-ups. by Qbertino · · Score: 2

    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
  22. Re:Animations in SVG or canvas by VoidEngineer · · Score: 2

    While not authoritative, the standard way to author SVG animations with HTML seems to trending towards a Javascript/jQuery solution. Raphael & Mashi is generally what you're looking for; although it lacks a IDE still.

    http://raphaeljs.com/
    http://mashi.tv/

  23. Real issue....locked doors by PortHaven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Real issue....locked doors by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And not a peep out of the Dept. of Justice on such anti-competitive practices.

      Because they aren't doing anything anti-competitive. THEY get to determine how their products are sold. They can choose to only allow things to be bought for their products in their store.

      Anti-competitive practices would be coming into wal-mart and saying 'if you want to sell iPhones, you can't sell any other kind of phone' ... or course walmart would tell them to fuck off, but a smaller local chain may have to capitulate in order to not lose sales of the iPhone ... and THAT is anti-competitive, and THAT is what Microsoft got in trouble for.

      Contrary to what you may think, Apple does have complete and total control over how ITS PRODUCTS are sold and handled. It can not tell anyone else how to handle other peoples products in their store. Apple say 'AT&T is the only company getting an iphone!' and thats okay. They can not say 'AT&T can ONLY sell the iPhone, no other phones if they want ours'

      Neither you or anyone else gets to tell Apple how to sell or what to do with their product just because you don't like it. I don't like that you're such a self entitled spoiled brat, but that doesn't give me the right to force you to not be such a douche does it?

      In the end....it's the consumers who lose. Less choice.

      Thats the GPL vs Anti-GPL argument. You're arguing that losing flash means losing choice. Which is like me saying that GPL takes away choice because I can no longer NOT distribute the code.

      And in both cases, it can be interpreted the other way. The user is being protected from being locked into a single vendors implementation.

      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?

      And according to every financial report they've ever put out, the iTunes music store and the App store do just a little better than breaking even. This is publicly verifiable fact. They aren't sitting on 40 billion in cash because of their death grip on Apple developers, and no matter how many times you try to imply that, it still won't be the case.

      The reason they've exceeded even Exxon-Mobile is because they are selling products people WANT. Exxon sells a product people need, people only buy as much of it as they have to and will buy it from the lowest priced person they can find. Exxon still makes a fortune because they can take advantage of the fact that its basically a requirement for many Americans to buy gas to commute at this point in time. Apple on the other hand makes a fortune selling products at almost 100% markup that are simply trendy gadgets ... but trendy gadgets which people are willing to pay way more for because they are that well done.

      Unfortunately, your too busy blaming Apple for being evil to notice why they are doing as well as they are.

      How does this world look for developers?

      I can tell you from experience that it looks incredibly profitable and the 'Apple Tax' you're referring to doesn't' really add up to anything more the cost of the service unless you're a big developer with an existing infrastructure for other reasons. This only hurts the big guys (and only a little), it does nothing but good for the little guys, which you'd know if you had any experience what so ever selling software to random people on the Internet. A proper sales infrastructure is a pain in the ass for a small shop to maintain, so you're going to be paying someone else to do it unless you're an idiot or have far more time than money or brains. Now go compare pricing for that service and get back to me when you find the competition that you'd be so eager to use instead of Apple.

      You're complaining about something that you clearly do not understand and have never been involved with.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    2. Re:Real issue....locked doors by BlueStraggler · · Score: 2

      Apple made a closed system that allowed all profits to funnel through it.

      Oh, and here I thought we were talking about HTML5, WebKit, and open web standards. Fuckin' Apple, ruining it for everyone.

    3. Re:Real issue....locked doors by RocketRabbit · · Score: 2

      This comment is full of so much shit that you turned my screen brown.

      Let's take it apart piece by piece. Your first point is about native apps being the only ones in the playground. I'm not so sure what you meanby that - you an install anything you wish on Windows and OS X. Phones are a different matter, but most folks are fine with that. Those who aren't can find another solution.

      Apple made a "closed" system but anybody can play in there. Does the Justice Dept have it in for Disneyland simply because you have to buy a ticket to get in? You have mistaken a monopoly from a business. Apple has no monopolies on anything. At least, you could argue that Nintendo has a monopoly on producing Wiis and on the Wii store, but again that would only be possible if you didn't know what a monopoly was in the first place. Why aren't you pissing under Nintendo's tree about how you can't play Xbox 360 games on the Wii?

      Then you say that Adobe doesn't make money on Flash, but on the tools. Isn't that true of just about any plugin manufacturer? Nobody buys plugins, so you saturate the market and then make the money on the toolset. Clearly if Flash cost them more money than they were making from it they would be dropping it.

      Apple takes a 1/3rd cut for their applications on the app store, but this beats the pants off the old arrangement, where applications cost $29.99 and up and the actual coder typically didn't get a share in the the profits at all! Now a coder has a large market available, and all he has to do it wait for the money to roll in. In the old days he would merely sigh and hope he still had a job with his large, heartless publisher.

      In short, for every person like you lamenting the inevitable fall of Flash, there are thousands who are saying "good riddance."

    4. Re:Real issue....locked doors by jbolden · · Score: 2

      How does this world look for developers?

      Pretty good, like most regulated markets. Customers trust Apple and so are willing to spend more. The iOS app market is 7x the size of the Android, Blackberry and Nokia smart phone app markets combined. Regulated capitalism is more profitable than anarchy for developers and better for consumers.

      _____

      In the end....it's the consumers who lose. Less choice. Few alternatives.

      That was the scenario under Java Mobile. The carriers controlled software. Under Blackberry and Palm you had an unregulated free market but it was tiny. How exactly are consumers under iOS experiencing less choice?

    5. Re:Real issue....locked doors by devleopard · · Score: 2

      That's oversimplification. Remember that the case was opened in 1991, before a single line of code had been written for Internet Explorer (or Netscape, or Winsock, or ....) IE was central, but so was the abuse of OEM's, in a world where 95%+ of all new computers shipped with Windows. Microsoft abused those OEMs, forcing them to bundle certain software.

      Apple is much different:
      1. Smaller share of market. (Slashdot loves to trumpet about Android's higher market share) Microsoft was found to be an abusive monopoly in the computer industry, not the Windows industry - Apple has no such monopoly.
      2. Apple doesn't abuse OEMs, since they manufacture their own devices.

      A better example of a monopoly would be if Google abused the phone vendors by forcing them to load certain software in order to be allowed to license Android.

      Keep in mind that most of the app stores out there (for example, deploying to the Nook) have very similar terms to what Apple is doing.

      --
      The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
  24. Flash and Silverlight... by ZenDragon · · Score: 2

    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.

  25. Re:One closed platform down! by Karlt1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/861-5-percent-growth-android-puny/

    But Android users don't buy apps....
    http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/861-5-percent-growth-android-puny/

    They don't surf the web
    http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20128243-264/android-browser-bumps-opera-for-no-2-spot/?tag=mncol;txt

    And even 2/3rd's of Google's mobile traffic comes from iOS devices....

    http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/two-thirds-of-googles-mobile-search-traffic-comes-from-ios-devices-18718/

  26. Re:Laid off - try to stay at Adobe by KJSwartz · · Score: 2

    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.

  27. Re:It's a shame when a buggy proprietary de-facto by makomk · · Score: 2

    Don't forget Apple's showcase of what HTML5 could do that sniffed browser user agents and refused to run on anything except Safari - because Apple would hate for anyone, especially the press, to get the impression that this new standard HTML5 could run on anything else.

  28. Re:Security leading to turn over by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

    That is why while everyone else is moaning at the XP EOL I'm like "happy day, oh happy day!" because I'm starting to see newer and newer XP machines that rather than see if they could just, you know, actually install 7 on the thing? They go out and buy a new box.

    My last load brought in by one of my suppliers had nearly a dozen late P4 as well as 4 dual cores, and a half a dozen Pentium Mobile and Athlon Mobile laptops, all in pretty damned good shape, know what I paid? $100 for all 15 boxes and because I'd need to replace the batteries $10 each for the laptops! Once he left I was practically giggling like a schoolgirl!

    Hell all I had to do was wipe and reinstall which since I have automated discs was nothing, I had to replace two power adapters on the lappies and one turned out to be toast, bad screen. Big fricking whoop I got $75 a pop for the desktops as fast as I could load them in the window and I didn't have to pay shit for batteries because at $100 each for the laptops folks didn't care! I called one old time customer and when he heard what i had he bought two of the laptops sight unseen, so he'd have one for his GF and a spare!

    So while I personally put a good AV and build my machines to last the idiots out there really do make me happy sometimes. I don't know why but folks just go insane for cheap laptops. Hell I have a 900Mhz P3 laptop with 256Mb of RAM and a 20Gb HDD and a guy handed me his number and has called 4 times wanting to make sure i take his $90 for it when the new power adapter gets here! Man I can't wait until the next load!

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.