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After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on from the let's-call-the-next-one-burnination dept.

An anonymous reader writes: From January 2016, Adobe Flash will be renamed to 'Adobe Animate CC', killing one of the most unfortunate names in web security as the company pushes the product further and further to HTML5 output. Adobe's release about the update, which will form part of the annual Creative Cloud upgrade, states that a third of all material output from the program is now HTML5. The transitional HTML5 Adobe animation program Edge Animate will be replaced by the renamed Flash product.

9 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. A rose by any other name... by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A Rose by any other name still smells as sweet.

    Adobe Flash by any other name still reeks of shit.

    1. Re:A rose by any other name... by slashkitty · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm guessing you're not turning off HTML 5.

      --
      -- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
    2. Re:A rose by any other name... by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

      Flash was originally created as an artist's tool - to allow streaming animation which didn't take up as much bandwidth by only transmitting backgrounds and sprites once and animating them on the client, rather than streaming raw video. For that purpose it's a fantastic tool, with several TV shows and animated movies still being created with it.

      Flash didn't ask to become the de facto scripting language for the web. It only became that because the HTML standard lacked scripting and programming capability which Flash provided. It was a security disaster because it was only ever intended to be an artist's tool and little thought went into making it secure. If you want to blame someone, blame the folks in charge of the HTML standard. They dragged their feet for over a decade, and didn't update HTML to provide many of the capabilities Flash provided until HTML5. HTML 4.01 was standardized in Dec 1999. HTML 5 was standardized in Oct 2014. It should have been made standard in 2001-2003.

  2. Ah, yes, a standard security technique. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think I remember that from one of my computer-security classes. Sanitize all your inputs, do length checks to avoid buffer overflows, and if those don't work, change your product's name.

  3. headline and summary wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    they are not killing the flash name; the new version of their *creation* package is renamed to Animate from Flash Professional since it outputs HTML5 in addition to SWF; this is not related to the client side SWF ecosystem

  4. This Is The Authoring Tool, Not The Plugin by American+AC+in+Paris · · Score: 5, Informative

    They're renaming the authoring tool, which is currently known as Flash Professional CC. It appears that the Flash Player will remain just that.

    This makes perfect sense, as Flash Professional CC is increasingly being used to generate media that targets HTML5, not Flash, as output. Renaming Flash Professional CC to Animate CC eliminates the whole need to do the song and dance of "we're talking about Flash the authoring environment, not Flash the plugin" to non-technical audiences.

    --

    Obliteracy: Words with explosions

  5. Linux support, PLEASE by pz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't care what they name it, within reason. It's a product / tool / whatever. Does it work? Good.

    In particular, will they PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE update the Reader application under Linux to support some kind of contemporary animation that's supported on other platforms as well? I don't care if it's Flash, HTML5, AVI, MOV ... I just don't care. It doesn't matter. What matters is that I can display animations within a PDF, and be certain that they will play for others on Windows or iOS as well. Right now, as a Linux user, I don't have that ability, really.

    --

    Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
  6. Re:...would smell as shitty as any browser by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And yeah, there's NoScript... but that tends to limit the web's basic functionality.

    NoScript is a HUGE improvement, in my experience. However, it's also a big pain in the ass to use, so I wouldn't foist it on my wife's computer for instance. What works well is to set the selection to whitelist scripts coming from the site's own domain, but after that you have to get good at manually enabling other domains, usually ones with "cdn" in them since most big sites deliver videos and such from affiliated CDN domains. If that doesn't work, however, then you're resorting to guessing; there's been a few times I've just started up an alternate browser that doesn't have NoScript installed just to look at one site, but this is rare. For the most part, NoScript is really helpful and speeds things up a lot, but it's really not that easy to use because the situation with JavaScript is such an utter mess, with dozens of scripts on every page it seems.

  7. Re:...would smell as shitty as any browser by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The FBI attacked Tor users this way last year; that attack is only known to the public because it was revealed in court proceedings. I don't know about you, but I'm going to assume there are still other JS exploits out there being used (by good and bad guys) that haven't yet become public.